First, excuse me for rudly cutting your work to pieces, I did it to 
figure out for myself why I was not comfortable with the composition.

in news:3CF387FA.BC39237B@gmx.de Christoph Hormann wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean with 'wringes'.
> 

Like when wringing the water out of a wet towel. There is a 
'unpleasant' tension in the image.

When looking at an image it is pleasant when the eye has a line or path 
that it can follow. A classic line for example starts at the lower 
lefthand side, goes up the diagonal, goes to the other side of the image 
and maybe goes down and back to near the starting point. Objects of 
interest are then placed on the path of the eye using the golden ratio. 
On one of these points is the main object, a moment of rest for the eye.

In your image my eyes jump left-right-left-right..., there is no moment 
of relaxation. Both the herd and the statue continuesly ask for 
attention.

To figure out where the 'problem' is I used an old painters trick (look 
at the painting trough a mirror) and flipped the image verically and 
horizontally. In all positions the image should be balanced. 

In your image it always was as if I'm looking at two images, not one. 
This is due to the fact that the image is light on the left side and 
dark on the right and that the area's covered by both sides are close to 
equal. Also the position of the point of attention in the dark side (the 
reflective statue) is very close to the center of the image.

So what I did, first move the statue away from the center, no 
improvement. Then flip the image (step1.jpg), still not right. Actually 
it puts more emphasis on the 50/50 division of the image. Maybe make an 
extra hole in the wal to connect the two parts of the scene better. Mmm, 
the big problem stays the symmetric division of the image. Lets extend 
the image more to the left (step2.jpg). Better.

The eye now moves from left to right and up, stops at the frame goes 
down over the white plane and start again with the statue. A smooth 
movement.

Hope this explains what I said in my earlier post.

Ingo

Post a reply to this message

Attachments:
Download 'Step2.jpg' (17 KB) Download 'Step1.jpg' (15 KB)

Preview of image 'Step2.jpg'

Preview of image 'Step1.jpg'