Posted by JL Morris on December 15, 2007
Posted under
Color,
Critiqued,
Landscape
Mono Lake is located on the eastern side of the California Sierra Nevada Mountains about 300 miles north of Los Angeles. The water level of this lake fell for many years exposing magnificent tufa formations, rock-like calcium carbonate deposits. The lake is in the process of being refilled and the tufas are re-submerging, many of them lost to photographers. Mono Lake, for some reason, has consistently wonderful golden hour morning light. This magnifies the gold and oranges of the vegetation and turns the tufas, which are gray at any other time of day, yellow and rich tan hues.
This is a good example of that golden hour light. If you were to return an hour later you would not bother taking out your camera, the magic light would have passed. The landscape presented here has the classic three zones; foreground, middle ground and distance composed into three horizontal bands. I feel the subject of this photograph is the light color and the relationship of the land and tufas to the water.
There is a modification I would reocmend to the photographer. In the foreground there are two distracting stones near the bottom on the left and right corners. These could be eliminated with a little cropping. This change would have the added benefit of narrowing down the foreground to the same width as the other two zones and thus giving us a composition that is divided into equal thirds.
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Cropped 
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Cropped 
December 15th, 2007 at 10:48 am
James, I like the border. When you crop and you doing landscape it seem like you like to strech the photo is that correct?
December 15th, 2007 at 10:56 am
A wonderful and peaceful landscape shot. The cropped version is much more powerful. I would have also tried to crop a little more from the left. This would have moved the tufa formation out of the center.
Sometimes it feels like that many photographers are afraid to crop outside the standard formats. I always feel like, try first the standard format, but after this see if there is a more powerful crop that emphasizes your subject. Remove with the crop some distraction or implement the rule of third better. In my opinion many landscape shot look better in a more panoramic style format.
I guess what I am saying is, play around with cropping it is just a digital file you are working with and you can always reverse it. It also trains you eye for the next time you take a shot.
December 17th, 2007 at 1:41 am
The cropped version is doubtlessly stronger than the uncropped one.
The first thing I noticed about this picture is that it loses a conciderable amount of power when it is displayed small, which forced me to deliberate between the crops.
I feel I may have overcome this with a simple solution, display it cropped and BIG. I’d hang this on my wall, but I’d make it 2′x 4′.