“View from a dockside bar” original photo by L. Lemley, 26 January 2019, shared and used with permission under CC BY-NC 4.0 Deed
One of the benefits of having a smartphone with a camera is being able to take lots of photos and instantly share those pictures with family and friends. The original photo I have chosen is one that my mom shared with me from a trip she took several years ago to the North Carolina and South Carolina coast, near Myrtle Beach. While most people might think of the Myrtle Beach area as a party scene, the surrounding little coastal towns are much quieter, especially in January. She snapped several photos that afternoon of boats coming up the river, one by one…
The original picture needed several corrections. First, the boat that is moving through the water appears too far away to be an effective focus, and the big white boat docked on the left, as well as the poles and other dock structure in the right foreground, are distracting from the calm water and the marsh grasses on the other side of the river. Also, the moving boat is almost centered in the original image, so it doesn’t follow the rule of thirds.
In order to create the derivative image, I used the cropping tool in Photopea to remove the distractions from the foreground. Then I moved the image around so the little boat is near the bottom third and on the left side. This not only changes the focus on the boat to follow the rule of thirds, but it also allows room for the boat to move through the water as it heads home at the end of the day.
“Heading Home” by Carole Lemley, licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 Deed. This work is a derivative of ‘View from a dockside bar’ by L. Lemley, licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 Deed.
The image you chose is a good example of how simplifying background and foreground elements can refocus an image. In the original, I was definitely focused on the pier in the lower right and didn’t register the boat until after I had tried to figure out what was going on with that (can you tell I don’t know a lot about boating?) It’s also a good example of how it can be difficult to fix a crowded frame in post-production – it must’ve been tricky to crop the image just right to exclude everything else going on in the frame!
Since the CC BY-NC 4.0 Deed license says to “indicate if changes were made” with the attribution I’d recommended adding “This work is a derivative of ‘View from a dockside bar’ by L. Lemley licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 Deed” to the caption of the cropped image to cover your bases (even though the original copyright holder is your mom!)
For future reference, I agree with adding the derivative portion of the CC licensing because you never know! I like the cropped image so much more from an aesthetic perspective. The first photo seems really busy and takes away from the focus of the photo (which should be the boat!) I think you did a really good job of directing the focus to the boat sailing home without any distracting imagery in the background and without getting rid of any essential information in the photo. Like Linnea said, it must have been tricky to crop it just right!
What a cute little boat capture! Both photos do a good showcasing the slow moving peacefulness found on the shores of the Carolinas. The original photo feels like a landscape picture so, it is great that you chose to focus on the boat with your crop, making the boat the main character of the photograph. Good job leaving the room for the boat to move forward in the photo. I definitely would have tried to give the boat as much space as possible in front of it and you were working with a very tight space.
Your mother looks like a professional photography, nice picture. I like how you zoomed in from general photo to focus on the boat. I like how you explained the photo where this photo been taken and how you edited and crop the photo to make it clearer. A small comment that I would like to say if you were able to big the information that under the photo it will be easier to read.