I don't know the story behind this house, but I see it all the time from the road when I travel to see some friends in Ohio. I immediately thought of it when I saw the 'Desolation' theme. I often wonder why this beautiful home on all this property was started, and then left to decay for years. Everyone has a theory, but when I look at it, I see a husband and wife who set out to build their dream home, and then something happened in their life which prevented them from finishing it... perhaps the death of a spouse? Or a child? Or maybe they just lost all their money in the stock market crash. In any case, it seems to meet the definitions of 'desolation' that I read, including 'sadness resulting from being forsaken or abandoned' and 'the state of being decayed or destroyed'. I wonder if voters will see it the same way?
The lighting and coloring that I tried to achieve seems very dependent on monitor calibration -- I looked at this at a couple different monitor settings and it is all over the place. I really like the dark, muted colors the way I'm seeing them, but not everybody else is likely to see what I'm seeing unfortunately.
I purposefully desaturated the greens and yellows (present in the weeds) to give more of a 'mood' to the image. I drove to take the picture on a day when storms were expected to get an interesting sky behind the house. I really like the way the sky turned out...
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I feel that it is underexposed and the subject is not interesting enough. It may have been a great building if it was not for the nasty tacky looking white coverings...
Also, it would have improved the image is there was less of the greenery and more of the house to fill the frame. It would have been nice if you waited for another time with less cloud cover and a sunset to shine vibrant colours on the wite coverings and create dramatic shadows.
Successful at conveying desolation...nice idea. In my opinion, if you had shown more of the driveway and less of the left side, it would have improved the photo.
hey great image capture and subject. I love the sky...I know you can not edit the colours for the competition, but for yourself i think if you add a bit more green into the grass it would look excellent (7)
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