Desert Morning

I am really enjoying the composition until I arrive at the top. The tops of trees being cutoff does not look right to my eye and is pulling my attention there. The rest of it I quite like.

Attractive desert image, Igor. The strong backlighting on the desert flora is great, making for some nice color in the desert landscape. I also like the nice variety of desert flora respresented in this single view. The top of the image, with the cut-off ? and the sky is a bit of a negative, but still a fine image overall.  

Igor: Finding a crop to eliminate the sky would suit me better and make the cacti and trees exiting the frame a non-issue. I do like the backlight a bunch and would look for tighter comps emphasizing that. >=))>

I am finding that the two tall plants that meet the top of the frame carry my eye up and out of the image, Igor. Other than that, the nice color and textures in the lower part of the image work very well.
--P

Igor,

While I've never been, your photography and vision of/from this place impresses me that you've captured the essence of the region. It comes through in your photographs.

I really like the diversity of not only the cacti and vegetation, but the colors that come along with that diversity.  I especially like the reds of the barrel(?) cactus.  The yellows atop the tall Cirios? are yet another nice splash of color.  I would say though that you might selectively pull back on the green saturation on a number of the cacti in the lower part of the image.

In addition to the diversity, I also appreciate the composition and layering with the two primary fore and background ridges.  The bg ridge almost comes across as being "scarred" as if it was recovering from a burn or something - but I'm sure more due to distance and lack of detail we can see.

Regarding the cut off plants in the horizontal frame, I'm not bothered by them.  You've chosen just enough sky to balance with the amount of immediate foreground.  My own thoughts on cutting things off on the edges of frames... if you're going to cut something off, or include it, make it obvious in your choice. Clearly to me, but cutting off two of them, you did that on purpose and combined with the amount of sky, I think this works just fine; especially with the horizontal comp.

After all that slicing and dicing, I could have just commented, this is an excellent image from Baja and wonderful representation of the place...

Lon

 

What a beautiful array of succulents and desert foliage. The side-lighting works beautifully to add depth and the composition is well balanced, except I'm on the fence about the cactus tops being cut off.

Love the red glow of the Barrel cacti here, Igor.  It's a fine desert scene, where you've done well at emphasizing the land and the first ridge, with the cut off tops.

Igor, you have some very nice light and a great composition here. Everything is thoughtfully arranged. My first thought was that I didn't like the cacti exiting up top, but I doubt there is an alternative to the way it's presented. It might be nice if you could even out the CPL effect in the sky, and there are a couple of artifacts in the sky, one on the left edge and one above the brownish cactus top to the right of the left cactus.

You had a tough job here because of those tall trees in the FG.  I love the depth of this and I love being able to explore the open FG (which is one thing I love about Paul Breitkreuz's desert images).  Being able to explore that area absolutely fascinates me. I love the light too as well as the patches of color.  That said, the two tall trees going out of the scene are really causing an issue for me.  I don't don't if a lower composition which includes the tops as well as a lot of more boring sky would be any better either.  There doesn't appear to be a true winning situation here as any direction you take is negated by another negative which seems to overcome the positive the change makes.  That's a crying shame because this has SO MUCH going for it.

The comments about the 'cut off' cirios have been interesting and somewhat unexpected. But why would anyone expect others to think like they do? But since there have been so many on the subject I feel I should address it.

I clearly wanted to crop these off nowhere near the top. I wanted to bring attention to the beautiful texture of their bark and to add another element to the composition. That is add strong verticals to an image that is otherwise horizontal layers. I feel I did that with the large cirio on the left and and the one on the right although would have preferred that the cirio on the right had not gone higher before forking 

I do agree with Lon that the distant hill layer looks 'grungy'. I attest this to a DOF issue where an f/8 aperture has virtually no depth of focus at 90mm lens. Even though I meticulously focused on the front ridge, I assumed that I stood far enough that the focus would remain to infinity. It did not. That's why this image actually went into 'also ran' bin of images for years. This should have been shot at f/16.

As suggested by some, Cirios are normally shot from a great distance to add to the landscape or shot close up with great evening skies using their expressive tops as the main attraction. Neither was the case in this image. 

This is a marvelous image Igor ... one of your best IMHO. I love how the entire cast of desert characters (if we can refer to them that way) are glowing in the morning light. There is so much to explore and enjoy in this scene. The structural design of your composition definitely raises the interest level but is subtle at the same time, thereby coming off an non-overbearing. 

 

The reds, yellows and greens of the backlit cacti stand out nicely against the cyan of the shady slopes.  I'd keep the cyan/blue for that reason.  The scene looks like it holds some tighter crop compositions and telephoto ops- looks like one could have so much fun shooting this.  I am guessing the one cacti on the left rose way up into the sky.

Igor, Did you receive notification of this comment?

No I did not, Jim.