Just pictures

[westhinder]

Fond memorie, no photographic ambitions:

 

[Kukri]

Mersea Quarters by Cathay Pacific 747, 2014:

 

[Slowboat35]

Dusk on Hamford Water

 

[Slowboat35]

Not the best of pictures but a picture of the best of yachts. Maidie, the Big Banana, the most exquisite boat I've ever seen - showing everything she's got.

 

[Slowboat35]

Picture-postcard mooring, Dodecanese.

 

[Kukri]

Not the best of pictures but a picture of the best of yachts. Maidie, the Big Banana, the most exquisite boat I've ever seen - showing everything she's got.

View attachment 92571

That jackyard topsail really is “setting like a card”.

 

[Slowboat35]

You should see that boat go with a bit of wind! She only has a few inches of freeboard, carbon spars, dyneema to the shoelaces, kevlar sails and I think I'm right in saying 100 year old hull! Uniformed crew of youngsters as sharp as razors and they race her like a demon. afaik she can't reef - she carries what she starts with
Broads racing is an extraordinary spectacle, fast and competitive as hell - around the cans like a dinghy course but with 20+ big powerful boats all jammed up together in a small piece of water - some of them 50ft monsters like Maidie! The boats may be old but it isn't for the faint-hearted!

 

[Slowboat35]

Pyefleet again and as the camera saw it - not photoshopped.

 

[MikeBz]

Continuing my theme, this time in the Pyefleet on 9 August 2015:

 

[alandalus11]

Peace

 

[Tomahawk]

Ok.. same image just a bit cropped and straightened.

 

[Tomahawk]

Or this?
I have cropped the majority of the left and top to focus the image on the ripples on the water leading from lower left to the line of boats leading towards the upper right.

 

[Tomahawk]

A pair of scissors has always been the photographers best friend to improve an image.
Of the two croppings, I think I prefer the lower one.

But there in no "right way".

 

[Koeketiene]

Picture taken from our mooring opposite SYH.
IIRC, the last Summer before our move to Brittany (2015).



Same place - another evening



Lastly

 

[Habebty]

Mersea Quarters by Cathay Pacific 747, 2014:

I’ll see your Mersey Quarters, and raise you a River Alde (Ryanair)

 

[Black Sheep]

A pair of scissors has always been the photographers best friend to improve an image.
Of the two croppings, I think I prefer the lower one.

But there in no "right way".

I agree with you that playing around with cropping an image can often improve it. And I can see why you've attempted the two crops you've provided - trying to follow the "rule of thirds" with the horizon; trying to create a visual lead-in.

But, in my very personal opinion, you've taken a stunning picture that took my breath away with its beauty, and converted it to a couple of very attractive, but rather ordinary images.

I'm trying to analyse why, and it's not easy. Partly the 2/3 : 1/3 look is rather formulaic. But I think part of the beauty of the original is the symmetry between sky and water. Not the exact symmetry of a sunset on smooth water, but the impressionist echoes that come from what looks like a grey dawn breaking over ruffled water. With your two edits, you're deliberately focussing on either sky or water. With the original, they are given equal weight; that equality and equivalence between sea and sky is part of the beauty of the East coast. And something that has been lost in the cropping.

I'm sure others may think differently.

 

[Black Diamond]

The top two were taken at 7am yesterday morning, in Strood Channel and then up the little creek by the Strood that usually is infested with jet skis and reeks of aftershave. The third was taken 8am Saturday morning, at the top of Peldon Creek with the smack Peace in the centre, pride of the recently late and highly respected John Milgate.

 

[Tomahawk]

If this were the Lounge there would now be full on war. Someone would wade in with a diatribe about how to properly compose a picture.. But East Coast folks are of a kinder disposition.

 

[pvb]

Sunset at Wrabness...

 

[alandalus11]

Tranquility.