Here is an image that has a lot going for it (with many positive comments regarding it), but one drastic thing wrong with it that basically ruins the entire photo, at least for me.

The main thing favoring it is the light. It has nice light. Beautiful light. The bright, controlled light in the distant cloud, the dark light in the above rain clouds, the soft warm light on the bank in the lower left corner. All of this adds to a nice subdued mood to the photo. This didn’t just happen though. It was a process, from seeing the the scene before me, to capturing it in a 3-frame HDR image, to combining the three exposures together, to tweaking (or more really) the HDR image into what you see above. (maybe one day soon I’ll post all of the interim photos contributing to this final image)

All of that is fine. (we can address the issues of HDR and “reality” in a later post) But no matter how great the light in this photo looks to me, all I can really see is the bridge leading me right out of the frame. My eyes jitter like a crazed schizophrenic’s, unsure of where to look or how to focus. I think if I could have been much farther to the right or the left, the composition could have matched the light, or at least not been so distracting. But this was as far right as physically possible to go where I was. Otherwise I would be jumping off of the ledge into a marsh, possible with waiters or maybe a boat – but not given my options at the time. A boat would also have enabled me to be far to the left, in the harbor facing the bridge. That might have been nice, and it might have blocked my view of the cloud. It really is the cloud that I wanted to take a photo of, but the bridge drags me away from the light.

But I will say, it is beautiful light.

Thoughts, Turing machine?