To my eye, something doesn't work here: though it's quite difficult to say what, exactly. Compositionally, perhaps your vanishing point could be more strongly placed in frame, rather than this halfway house between central and privileged on a thirds line. I'm also not sure the colours work well - that beige colour of tthe metalwork is rather neutral and uninteresting, and the brown is quite lifeless too: did you think about making this a monochrome image? The structure itself is very regular, which usually works better with a perfectly regular view of it, compositionally. Your slightly off-centred point of view adds an almost subconscious sense of disturbance to that regularity, and I don't think that helps either. There is a conflict between the very simple elements of the bridge in the upper part of frame - simple geometrical structures, beams and uprights against a clear blue - and the boards and lower area, where the lines become more chaotic and complicated. It's like two diffrent ideas of an image together, and that also makes it a tricky picture to appreciate on any one level. I think perhaps the question is, 'which part of this structure was it that really interested you?' - enough to shoot it with the evident care you have put into this.
After all this, I think it is that tension between the simplicity of the upper part of frame, and the complexity of the lower that most hurts this image: I've tried looking at the upper third (or so) and the lower two thirds (or so) separately (just by framing with the window), and i think what you have is a joining of two quite strong images in such a way that the impact of either is somewhat taken away.
Technically, of course there are a lot of strong things here: focus, presentation (I mean compression, and colour rendition) are absolutely fine, and there is strong detail present - the smoothness of the metalwork comes out, and that kind of texture is an element many people struggle with. |
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