P#19: A Fairytale Moment at Sudbury Mill

Picture Perfect

Jim Zuckerman: This is a picture of a Sudbury Mill in Massachusetts. If I remember correctly, it's somewhere near Sudbury in western Mass. It's been so many years since I shot this.

If you look at this picture, you'll see it's a very pretty composition. There's beautiful falling water there that you can use a long shutter speed with. (click the image for a larger version)

If I were to do it differently now I would have eliminated that white sky. You see how it pulls the eye away from the rest of the picture because it's the brightest element in the composition.

In the photograph with the birch barks and the red leaves we talked about just a few minutes ago, that was a white background that was uniformed throughout the entire picture. It almost was like a neutral backdrop to the subject.

In this case, your eye can't help but go to the white sky. It shouldn't, because that's not the subject of the photo. That white area diverts attention away from the real subject, which of course is the gristmill and the color of the trees.

This is a good example of where some cropping would have worked, or you can use Photoshop to clone that area. You could just put trees there, tree branches. That would solve the problem too.

In Closing

While this picture of the mill may look perfect to us, Jim Zuckerman sees some room for improvement. If he could do things differently, he would have eliminated the white sky due to the attention it draws away from the actual subject of the photo. While this picture of Sudbury Mill may be breathtaking without any adjustments, Jim may consider cropping it or altering it in Photoshop to get the full effect of the breathtaking scenery.