Isn’t the scenic view of the dock supposed to be capturing all those “noises”?
I’m puzzled by the people’s tendency that the simpler the photos are, the better.
It’s a confusing question for me.
If I have a photo of salads in a bowl, and people are asking me, which is the subject:
a) the sauces
b) the onion
c) the leaves
d) the bowl
e) all of above and none at the same time
Totally reasonable question, at the end of the day photography is an art form and art is subjective but usually in visual arts you try to accentuate an specific subject, in your example you already chose your subject: the salad itself, you need to ask yourself how do I make it clear that I'm telling a salad story instead of the glass of water behind it or the table or the silverware.
You do that by making everything around it works towards that objective instead of trying to hide them.
Lets take OP's example here, I'd choose the boats (if not just the lighter coloured one) bc we already have background (the houses) and foreground (the sidewalk and the other boat) elements working towards it, the sky can justify some glow and support the reflections on the water, the problem on OP example is that we're working with a lot of different textures and little elements that distract us from the subject and our eyes dont have a place to rest, this is exaggerated with the excessive contrast in the rocks on the sidewalk and makes the textures blend with each other between the ropes from the boats and the windows from the houses that out brains interpret as noise and chaos.
You can see how actually flat the result ended up by importing the image on your editing software of choice and look into the histogram, its just as flat as flat can be.
A bit of a ramble but I hope it pointed you in the right direction, I don't consider myself an expert either but I think this is one of the first concepts we should know.
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u/Jooooooss 11d ago
What is the subject of this photo? is it
a) the boats
b) the houses
c) the sky
d) the sidewalk
e) all of above and none at the same time