dancing underwater by Kenvin Pinardy

Please note the following:

• This image has been selected for discussion. It is not necessarily the "best" picture the Elves have seen this week, nor is it a contest.
• Discussion of photo.net policy, including the choice of Photograph of the Week should not take place here, but in the Help & Questions Forum.
• The About Photograph of the Week page tells you more about this feature of photo.net.
• Before writing a contribution to this thread, please consider our reason for having this forum: to help people learn about photography. Visitors have browsed the gallery, found a few striking images and want to know things like why is it a good picture, why does it work? Or, indeed, why doesn't it work, or how could it be improved? Try to answer such questions with your contribution.

I like the colors, composition (which could be improved, I think.) and the lights and shadows. I would first like to know what the subject is dowing and why. Even not knowing, I still think the picture is interesting and attention grabbing, two of the prime purposes of making such a photograph.

To me It might be better if cropped on the right side a full inch which would eliminate the artist's signature, but also cut away some dead weight. That would improve the compostion a little I think. It would bring the face more into the area of the "rule" of thirds so many of us strive for. The more I examine it, the more I think both left side as well as the right side should be cropped away. Make the picture a square format and support that rule of thirds, increasing the size of the figure within the picture.

As a suggestion, not to the artists here on POW, but rather the Elves, I would recommend that as most of the pictures placed on this page have a story behind them, that that story be told. We could understand the mind of the photographer better, and maybe learn a trick or two for future use of us, the observers and critiquers.

Willie the Cropper

The subject is dancing! She's enjoying the fact that she can swirl her body. More power to her! I'd slip a disc doing what she's doing.

The crop shown looks like the standard 35mm format, and adds a certain elegance to the presentation, I think, but Willie the Cropper has a good point in that his cropping suggestions eliminate any possible extraneous information. One will have to decide whether they want a little more elegance, or a little more impact. Judging from the subject matter, I would lean towards the elegance, although if presented with the tighter crop, I doubt I'd ask for a wider view.

This is beautifully done, in my opinion.

I agree with Bill Tate about the centered composition, but a too tight crop would eliminate much of the interest this image has, that is, the surroundings. I've seen many -really interesting- of these underwater shots, most of them done in a pool where there's always a "hard" environment; here those sorroundings are soft, mild, quite strange, adding to the fairy feel of the subject.

The other minor observation that I would made, is that the lady is looking straight to the camera. Like it's now, makes me remember what we already know: that she's holding her breath just for the camera. Instead of that, to my taste a more successful composition would be a more relaxed pose, that could convey better the message of joy and lightness that these kind of shots usually seems to carry. Hey, I know it's not that easy...! :-)

Last but not least: I really envy people that can enjoy photography doing images of this kind.

Interesting & original. I would crop some on the right side, however

I could very much be wrong, but here's what I think:
Given the huge amount of undefined details in this image, as well as the imperfections that seem to appear around the edges, I think that such an image would require a truly amazing skill if it were to be printed at any size larger than 8 or ten inches on the smaller size.
Unfortunately, at this size (453 x 680 pxls), I couldn't identify any detail at all in photoshop well enough to reach any conclusion.
I don't personally find this image to be among Kevin's most interesting ones - simply due to the fact that this subject matter leaves me cold with no message to chew -, but based on many of his other technically very good fantasy images, I'd readily admit, that he probably has the skills it takes to create a large and clean file - even for this one. Unfortunately, what would be really interesting to me would be the technical aspects of this particular creation, and I can't get to them with such a small jpeg.
Finally, for me, this sort of work needs to be fairly close to perfect or goes directly to the trash. I know I could not personally manage well a task like this one, even if I were to spend hundred hours or more in front of my computer. So I am at the same time very admirative of the skills shown by those who can actually handle such jobs, and I am also very suspicious when I see this sort of work on a web site. Because I know how easy it is to solve problems on a 650pxls file when it comes to water, or transparent or blurry backgrounds.
The moment of truth, for this kind of work, is the print... So is this good or not ? I can't tell - it's just too small...

Kevin has an incredible body of work in his portfolio.

Apart from the fine artistic rendering and points mentioned above, the trouble I have with this picture is the background Kevin elected to include - a terrestrial forest scene. This, in my opinion, ruins the picture. It does nothing but illustrate blending skills and defying viewer expectation of seeing something more "realistic", and by that, I mean a background fitting of an imagined scene which might be aquatic based - a kelp forest , perhaps.

As it stands, the picture is beautiful at first glance but quickly wanes as I digest its details.

Regarding Michael's comment, I'm in the need to confess my ignorance, I didn't see in my last comment that the background is not real -or at least original to this shot. If that's true, I would share his same frustration.

Something similar happened to me with last week's PoW -see my comment there if you are in the mood. Coincidence?

Thanks so much for all of your comments and critiques, I really appreciate it and thanks to elves for chosing this image as POW

This photo was taken in a pool with 3 meters depth. in this photo, I use large sheet of cloth to cover the ceramic tile of the pool

One thing for sure about underwater photography which also happened in this photo session, is the difficulty to get the right expression or beautiful body moves that I prefer before this session, I did the underwater photo session without any diving equipment, and it's extremely difficult. Fortunately, this photo was taken using helps of adequate diving equipment and underwater camera housing, so there was not much trouble to get the subject tack sharp.

The only major difficulty was getting the model expression, which always much more difficult to get in the underwater

I did the post processing of the image in photoshop by adding texture layer as the background