My Gate

Exploring the limits of my d7000 f3.5 1/13s iso 200 18mm hand held wouldn't have tried this with the 450d

I really like this photo. I like the darkness, I love the light and I like that bit of flare coming in from the right. It's a tricky image, though. I think it almost *doesn't* work. But the spider web pulls it all together and makes it complex enough to really get me involved. I find I can keep going back and scanning it for more details - looking for meaning. And that may be where it falls short. It's suggestive - but there's not quite enough there to really say much. I'm left hanging. I feel like it needs one more element to really push it over the edge. I can't help but wonder if putting a person in the background would do it.

Or maybe it's just fine and I'm working too hard to make it something it isn't and doesn't need to be. Maybe a well-lit, detail photo can stand on its own and I shouldn't try so hard to always be a deep artist :)

Thanks John, the story behind this image is that I arrived home after dark the other night and my wife was watching me come up the drive and noticed the back lit spider webs highlighted by my truck headlights and suggested it might be worth seeing if an image was possible. I didn't need much more of a excuse than that to get the camera out....:)
Quite pleased with the way the camera handled the awkward lighting.

I'm disappointed this image didn't get more comments / criticism. I wonder if it's because it didn't interest people or is it that they just didn't know how to critique it? Anyone have anything to say? Do you think this was a bad choice for Featured Photo? If so, why?

I think that this is one of those images that really depends on having a certain brightness. All the testing that I have done shows that the brightness of our monitors is very different. To me it's too dark to really see what it is. - Terry

I like it. I don't always feel like a photo needs to say anything more than "here's something neat to look at" if it's visually interesting enough. I often like dark photos with highlights too. Just something kind of mysterious about them. If the highlights reveal something like a spider web, even better!
I'd call this a good shot. To take it up to great it would need something more, either deeper meaning or maybe the spider with some prey to add drama.

it definitely has mystery, a big plus in my book. I think what hurts it though is 1) it seems a tad soft and really should be razor sharp, and 2) like Old Clicker says, it's so dark that it's hard to visually grab any information out of it. I also feel that the composition, while definitely not formalistic, may be just too unusual to accept. The shapes seem cut off at the top and also in the dark bottom, and the horizontal line running across the upper left and light emulating from the right makes it almost eerie. In that sense, this photograph really makes me think of late-century London, maybe a Sherlock Holmes novel? :D

PJ, I've been disappointed with response in the forums here for a long time: all lookers, no comments. But I read your post elsewhere that said the lookers are actually probably just bots.

G