Saying Goodbye Reject

[Mr Darcy]

One of my early concepts for the Saying Goodbye theme in the recent competition was a shot of one of the many roadside shrines that sadly "adorn" our highways.
In the end I rejected this as I found the concept just too miserable, and while saying goodbye is often sad, this just went too far.
Also, a candid I shot of my father in law fitted the theme so well, I went with that instead. SInce I won a prize with that shot, it must have been a good call Of course this one may have come first

Anyway, back to the image:
I find this quite powerful, though saddening. Aspects of the composition that work for me are the road giving context, the oblivious car speeding by, the barren strip the shrine is in, and ,not least, the sign (Overtaking lane 2km ahead) near the top of frame.

Original JPG with minimal PP (took WB from cross arm & minor sharpening) Framing is as shot.



I would appreciate comment from others

[dviv]

A very powerful photo Greg.

I agree about it being miserable, but think that is part of it's power.

Thanks for posting.

[gstark]

Greg,

What David has said, but more ... perhaps a lower angle of view?

What about a point of view closer to the roadway? And with no vehicle present?

[Ant]

Just to be contrary, I like the vehicle driving by but would like it further through the frame. I see one of these regularly near my place and they always make me wonder what the story is behind it. This evokes the same emotion, what happened on this pretty much dead straight section of road?

Ant.

[sirhc55]

What a lovely shot. Nice bright flowers coupled with a white cross, the green grass and a traveller. Excuse my sarcasm but to make this photo have punch it really needs to be something other than pretty, pretty. Maybe a high contrast black and white would emphasise the morbidity

[ATJ]

I wasn't sure what advice to offer... and then I read Chris' comments and I have to agree. I generally don't like black and white, but I think it would serve the subject matter well.

[Mr Darcy]

Thanks for the comments
I can't really do anything about the POV. the shrine in question is about 500Km away. But I did try BW & contrast conversion.

I really don't know what I am doing here so I tried two different ways.
First from the NEF, I used NX to convert to BW, then upped the contrast there then used CS2 to basically resize.


For the second, I worked from the JPG in CS2
I Took the Red info out then converted to GreyScale, then upped the contrast, then decided I had lost the sign, so I masked that and increased the brightness locally. My thinking in taking the red out was to attempt to emulate Pan-X (was it?) that was very insensitive to red


I also tried converting to CMYK then killing all the channels except K, but that got me nowhere.

There are differences in the results from two approaches, but they seem to be mostly lost by the time the photos get to the web. On my screen, before resizing, I prefer the second approach.