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from deleted224407/deleted (3,834) 
on December 11, 2005 9:21:57 AM CST
(4)
A wonderful graphic image which combines a nice combination of colors with simple lines to great effect.
You have very nicely captured the sun, with its colors moving from white (a bit overbright, but I'm not sure you can do much about that) to yellow to orange. That sets the stage, so to speak, for the amber background color. Much of the power of this image, however, comes from the perfectness of the circles of color. I don't know if this was the result of post-processing or not (flare is fairly common) but this is so stunning.
I think you have placed the sun in the perfect position. Horizontally, it divides the frame along the lines of the golden mean. This communicates to me a solid, stately feel along with a timeless balance. Vertically, you have set the sun just below the centerline, emphasizing its setting rather than rising. A small detail which would have further emphasized the balance of the photo would have been to crop so that the distance between the sun and lower edge was the same as the distance between the sun and the righthand edge.
Against this background of color, the simple lines of the grain and the silhouettes of the birds stand out nicely. In contrast to several other critiques, I like the leaf curving in from the righthand edge toward the top of the frame. It guides my eye into the circle of the sun, from where it can move along the lines you have given me to ponder. There is another leaf, which is barely distinguishable because of its color. This leaf is distracting, but only because it is only barely visible.
I like that you have not put the intersection of the two main lines at the center of the circle. This contributes to the visual tension of the image, and encourages my eye to continue moving through the image. The strong horizontal stalk takes my eye out to the birds enjoying their feast of grain. The placement of the one bird on the edge of the sun's disk offers my eyes an opportunity to circle back into the image. But the birds are also facing outward, and I'm not sure whether I like that or not. (Of course, I realize that it is difficult to get birds to change their facing on request!) Visually, their facing encourages me to move to the lefthand side of the image. Since there is nothing there to impede this movement, my eye then leaves the frame. This is usually a bad thing. But in this image, the entire orientation of the lines encourages movement to the left and out of the image. And this feeling of "leaving" is quite consistent with the theme of the setting sun. So overall, it seems that the birds cooperated nicely.
I think that the graphic quality of this image would be enhanced if two "improvements" were made to the stalks of grain. First, my eye would prefer to see the end of the horizontal stalk. Second, the presence of the digaonal stalk would be strengthened if it weren't so washed out by the sun, in contrast to the horizontal stalk through the sun's disk, which is recorded as a strong silhouette.
Doug
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