Steven: This picture was taken about 45 min before sunrise on a cold Florida morning (yes, there are some of those!), and the exposure was indeed a guess. If I can venture to recall, it was something like f/8 and 10-20 seconds.
Kim: This is the full frame of the slide, and I agree that there is a lot of black/blank space. On the positive side, all this space helps to transmit two things that help to make the scene (for me): 1) a sense of great empty spaces, both in the heavens and on the earth (that's a large salt water marsh straight ahead); 2) a sense of the light hovering between two planes of darkness, which effect is strongly reinforced by the reflection of Sirius on the water. On the negative side, I may be counting on too much knowledge of the specific context to create the reaction I'd like, and so the picture may fail at creating the effect I sought.
Marc: Thanks for the suggestions, but I would hesitate to do the particular panoramic crop you have described. The stars above and the one reflection below are important/essential composition elements, the picture would fail completely in my intent. Moving the stars about is something I wouldn't do either ...
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Marc Gougenheim{K:5398} 11/24/2002
"Less is more" ? Yes, sometimes. Can more be less ? Not if it's well organized, imo... Is less more here ? I'm not sure. I would personally tend to say no. Why ? Because there is so little, and yet I am not pleased with the composition. So much space at the top and bottom, and so little by the sides seems strange to me - not very harmonious. You may want to try reducing top & bottom space by half and add black by the sides in PS. The resulting panoramic would look much better imo, much quieter - which matches the approach you went for. Then, do clone of the litle white starts... Moral of the story, to me, seems to be that the less there is in a frame, the more important the usage of negative space will be. Regards.
The top half of this image, I adore. The bottom half, seems too much negative space for that one little star. Maybe the print has all 3 stars in the reflection, but if not, I think a crop of just the top portion might make this stronger. Awesome colours, and would be interested to know exposures and what not as well. Did you clone out the other stars, or were these the only ones that showed up?
Cool effect Joffre, something almost unearthly about it. How long after sunset was this taken and what kind of exposure. Are these exposures "guesses" at this time of day (or night)?
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