Which stairset do you prefer?

Duckys54

I am torn and looking for some external opinions. Which of these 2 pictures do you prefer and why?

jclim00

I prefer the second composition, but to be honest those shadows are really, really distracting to me. I'd possibly retake this on a cloudy day.

timk519

jclim00 wrote:

I prefer the second composition, but to be honest those shadows are really, really distracting to me. I'd possibly retake this on a cloudy day.

It looks like someone's standing at the bottom of the stairs on both pictures, and that distracts from the overall feel of the image.

Cropping out the shadow from the one that focuses on the further stair-steps and doing some PP tweaks leaves this:



which isn't much, and has a tree trunk that dominates the foreground.

If you can shoot that w/out whoever was standing there, the question then becomes do you need an image where the focus staircase is on the foreground, or the background?

Blackwood

Trying to ignore the shadows, I prefer the first. I like curves that flow into the corners of photos.

darkdragon

I agree with the others about the shadows. As they are, I also like the first one best. In the first shot, I like the curve and I like that the steps in the foreground have an interesting pattern.

If you can get to the location again at twilight, I think you could get a really great long exposure here.

Duckys54

Thanks for your input guys. And as much as I'd love to reshoot it, Ireland is kind of far away and expensive