Classical music people, sorry, I couldn’t help it. A Martin Silo stands with a partner, both disintegrating, but still upright. Taken on a back road on my way up to Minnesota for the workshop. Though the clouds would break up in a few hours and farther up, I like the slightly melancholy feel of these as the backdrop to this all-too-common rural scene.
Type of Critique Requested
Aesthetic: Feedback on the overall visual appeal of the image, including its color, lighting, cropping, and composition.
Emotional: Feedback on the emotional impact and artistic value of the image.
Technical: Feedback on the technical aspects of the image, such as exposure, color, focus and reproduction of colors and details, post-processing, and print quality.
Specific Feedback and Self-Critique
I’ve passed this silo before (and it’s the only thing in the field btw - no house, barn or other buildings left), but haven’t shot it because the conditions weren’t right. This time they were, but I wonder about the balance and the contrast. There were a ton of bushes or saplings in the ditch in front of me that I had to shoot over and around while standing on a snowbank. I tried using them for framing and they were just distracting. So does the blankness work or is it just blankness adding nothing?
Technical Details
Handheld on snowbank.
Lr for a bit of a crop, wb adjustment and some masking to even out tonalities, pull up detail in the clouds and the usual tone curve to set black and white points. Sharpening and some clarity & texture, especially in St. Martin himself.
What a lovely, melancholy scene. The blank snow works for me because it adds to the empty feeling. The one thing that catches my eye is that tiny tree on the far left. For some reason it bugs me. A 2:3 crop off the left would work, also, I think.
Thanks for spending some time with this odd little scene @David_Bostock, @Dean_Salman & @Bonnie_Lampley. For most anyway. I am always stopping for this kind of thing around here. More to come! Oh and that little tree gave me fits, but I didn’t have the heart to cut it out.
I like the title and the blanket apology to any classical music fans.
The title seemed a little familiar to me but I had to look it up to jog my memory. I’m not a classical music fan but I know some folks who are.
I like this image, it does have a melancholy feel to it and the silo leaning slightly to the right adds to that feel for me. (I know the image itself is level).
You’re right, any other weather conditions probably wouldn’t have produced the kind of mood you captured here.
IMHO, the blankness of the FG works because it adds depth to the image, and it adds to the melancholy feel.
The balance and contrast look good to me.
It could be that my interest in this image/scene is because I used to live up that way, I used to live in Bagley, MN which is roughly 150 miles WNW of Duluth.
Most of the small farmers are out of business, while the big farmers continue to expand and even buyout the small farmers.
With current markets, they have to go big, or go home (so to speak).
I hope you had fun with the workshop!
It’s nice to see some of the areas that remind me of my youth, so thanks for that!
That’s what I call remote! Interesting that it looks similar. It’s tough to farm up this way. Big or small, but really hard if you’re a family farm. Those are almost wiped out. This is one of them. It is sad at first, but I’ve gotten more used to it.
And yep, it was and still is very remote. Our favorite Sunday outing was to an A&W Root Beer stand in Bemidji 40 miles away, our closest neighbor was 5 miles away
Several of the farms around us had those same silos as you show here, many are likely gone now and most farms were bought up by the more daring farmers.
I watch a couple of YouTube farming channels from central MN, one of them started out as a typical ca 400 acre corn and soybean farm but now they have 2 to 3 thousand acres, mostly from neighboring farms they bought, some are leased for 10 years at a time.
It’s sad but it is what it is.
There’s a special place in my heart for any kind of farm setting, especially under snow.
I have painting of a somewhat dilapidated red barn hanging on my dining room wall and it looks very similar to the barn we used to have in Bagley, it’s not coming down till I do
I posted a red barn in this category a couple weeks ago! Can’t resist them when they look as good as that one did. More rural stuff coming, too. Winter snow tends to simplify those kinds of shots by burying lots of junk!
I would think saints are pretty good at forgiveness, so you may be OK there. (I was going to say OK on that score, but didn’t…)
I think this is lovely, and very evocative of what I imagine must be the drearier aspects of winter – and of the rural life of yesteryear in unforgiving habitats. You’ve been doing an excellent job of cataloguing these fading remnants.
