Saturday, June 12, 2010

It's Summer, I Know

And the sky is rumbling with thunder.  I'm about 1 page from the end of Kate and I'll have to be dragged to the finish line.  But I found this photo of a Washington DC street after one of last winter's snowstorms and it's so gorgeous and evocative that I had to put it here.



Now that I'm looking at it, I'm not entirely convinced the right side of the photo needs to be there at all.




What's good about the photo is also what's bad.  The streetlight is a lovely element but it's in the wrong place.  He needed to tilt the camera up just a little so our eye is lead upward and out of the picture, following the tracks in the snow and to the distant lights.  But instead we're stuck with the street under his window.  I would love to have more of the buildings on the left side and that would have been possible if he had just moved a little left.

Did I say I was a photography major in college?  I was.  We had an old warhorse of a newspaperman as the teacher and he would have said this was a failure to crop in the camera when the photo was taken.  It's really hard for some people to compose the entire image.  Now with Photoshop you can do so much, the weaknesses of the photographer can be disguised.  But if the sky isn't in the frame, there's nothing I can do about it.

It's still a lovely snapshot but it could have been a fabulous photograph.

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