Death wrote:2. Yeah, the amount of pictures I lost to an overexposed sky or mirror reflections on this trip... Ack. I need a filter (Curse the stupidly large size of my new 17-55 lens/77mm.
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It does suck that CPLs get rather expensive at that size (lucky me that all my Takumars are only 49mm!), but it's one of those necessary investments, like a solid tripod. You should have a CPL on your shopping list anyway for all that sky-shooting you do.
What open air? You mean the stone?
Yeah, I was rather dissapointed by that, I took several shots at it, but didn't have any ideas. I got a decent shot of the eagle statue and in Arlington (In DC) at least.
I mean all the space that isn't stone on the left side - daylight, greenery, tour boat, etc.
I imagine a successful version of this to be basically much tighter - compress the distance between the foremost and aftermost tablets with a medium telephoto, stand more to the right so that they look like a tight stack, and get a close framing of the foremost tablet. The important visual effect here is the impression of endless ranks of names - let the frame be completely filled by stone, no need to get a complete top-to-bottom or side-to-side view. Hard to describe without doodling it out, though.
I wrote:Foreground-background separation is terrible, so the photo doesn't work. . .
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In other words, when you are making a photograph of a 3-D space (as opposed to a 'flat' photo like the detail of a side of a building) there needs to be some visual distinction that preserves the sense of depth in the scene. It could be perspective, it could be shallow depth of field, it could be composition - but there has to be something. When your foreground (the fist) blends completely into the background, there is no longer a foreground. Since the whole point of the photo is that only the fist is in focus, and that fist is no longer discernible, you are left with a photo of an out-of-focus background, which makes for a bad photo.
I have another "warmer" version of this shot, but I like this one, only miss that I see is that I should have pushed the underexposure down by another half stop.
Well, the placement of the statue in the photo and the mellow museum lighting + the black background creates a certain feeling, which the windows then ruin by being crooked and asymmetrically placed in the frame because of perspective, being far brighter than the rest of the lighting, and being out-of-color-balance. They look anomalous in what is otherwise a controlled photograph. They could be made to belong if control of the shot was extended to include them, but right now they look like an undesirable but unavoidable inclusion. Since the essence of photography is paring all the unnecessary elements out of the frame, the photo on the whole is weakened.
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