I find I have an emotional connection to my favorite photos, but I also think it’s because those photos are appealing to all. Generally they follow good photography patterns, namely:
- The subject is as in focus as was intended
- the subject is purposely and properly exposed
- the photo follows or tastefully breaks common design guidelines such as the rule of thirds, leading lines, Fibonacci lines, etc
What strikes me about my most-liked photo on 500px is that, while it adheres to these guidelines quite well, it’s never been my favorite. In fact, it was kind of just an experiment!
Looking back to November 2019, we decided to take another hike in our favorite park, Snow Canyon State Park. It was a gloomy and windy day, the kind where most people just stay at home. That had a nice effect, though, in hat there weren’t many people in the park. We wandered up hither and yon, and I took a few pictures here and there. The sky was flat and the wind made it almost unbearable, so not necessarily a banner day for shooting—or, even more, for a hike with family.
Fast forward a week or so and I am playing with the shots in Lightroom, but I just can’t make them pop. I recalled a YouTube tutorial on sky treatments, so I started to mess with the color tone on the sky and eventually ended up on the photograph seen here. I’m not afraid to do something tweaking in Lightroom and Photoshop, but I’m generally a purist and I’m not thrilled by over-saturation or such trends. But this photo needed help! Having accomplished that, I figured I’d post it to the community and see how it was accepted. I was stunned by the response – it had easily 2x the likes any other photo I’d published had received.
And so to this day I’m not sure what to think about this photo. I personally like a more realistic shot, but based on crowd appeal, heavily processing landscape photos seems like the trick for getting more attention on 500px.
What do you think? Are you in favor of modification or more a straight-out-of-camera type of viewer?