The Old Toll House, Pangbourne

Enjoyable shot!

Roy says more road and less sky.

Thank you for your kind suggestion, but in this instance the sky is very much part of the picture and does not need cropping.

Roy wants to know what's so special about this sky that you need so much of it.
And why crop the bridge when that is an integral part of the picture?
Or has the bridge been added from another location?

I assume here that you're referring to the shot,above, in the Comments section.

1. There was nothing special about the sky - in fact it should have been semi-Sheppertoned like the later shot, but either way the sky was incidental and not the subject of the picture. The elements of the picture were arranged to best fill the frame, and that included including the foliage at the top which holds it together.

2. The bridge was not cropped. The picture was taken with the camera set to 1:1 AR and that was the entirety of the frame. The bridge (which IS at that location - this was the bridge toll house) was hidden behind a b****y white van. There's a constant stream of traffic on that bit of road and one has to wait very patiently for a gap. On that occasion (a year ago) I was on an organised walk and (without losing the party, already disappearing far up the road) couldn't wait any longer. I airbrushed out the van as best I could but lost the bridge regardless. That's why, yesterday, I drove to Inglesham via Pangbourne so that I could re-take it. It was the same time of day and month so I knew the lighting and shadows would be similar.

The 2022 version with the bridge looks much better, as that gives context to the house being there, but you really don't need that excess sky at the top, or the foliage.

We'll really have to agree to differ on how much sky, in a picture, is "needed". There may be a dichotomy between where the eye is drawn and composition per se - where and how the subject fits in the frame and is balanced within it. Which is more important is a matter of artistic judgement. Roy's suggestion above looks, to me, rather truncated and utilitarian.

That's how Roy feels about most of yours.

Why did you want to "truncate" this one?
www.ipernity.com/doc/isisbridge/51311772

Marvelous pair! Stay well!

Admired in: www.ipernity.com/group/tolerance

hanks for posting your wonderful picture to

www.ipernity.com/group/buildings

To humour Roy. But you (not he) took the picture and published it in its full, untruncated glory, and that's a credit to your artistic judgement.

Don't get you. Roy LIKES a lot of lead in.

But only, it seems, if that lead in is upwards, starting at the bottom. Perhaps that's a difference between his eye and mine, I looking at pictures in a top-to-bottom direction.

I recently bought a print of Constable's Dedham Vale (my all-time favourite picture) and noticed that of the many prints of his work for sale, quite often the replicas are cropped versions of the originals. What might that say about modern-day, mass-market judgement and taste?

How can you look at a picture in top-to-bottom direction if it's taken from ground level?

I could be wrong.

That doesn't answer my question.

Where a picture was taken from and how it's afterwards viewed aren't the same. Europeans may scan them from left to right, Arabic speakers from right to left, and Chinese from top to bottom because that happens to be how they've been taught to read. What I'm saying is that not everyone scans from bottom to top, as you assume. If I'm right, then the right amount of lead in and where in the frame it needs to be depend on the viewer.

Red herring. Arabs and Chinese scan their texts in the direction that they're written.

This picture leads us from right to left along the road, and upwards to the chimneys.
I don't understand how your own eye is led downward.

If you did that with Roy's picture here, you would hit your head on the concrete.
www.ipernity.com/doc/isisbridge/51078674

The direction that Arabic and Chinese text is written is the same as the direction in which it's scanned, but Roy's picture of concrete slabs contains a "vanishing point" - converging lines - and these direct the eye independently of any cultural or personal (left/right eye) factors.

But I don't know enough about the mechanism of human visual perception to lay down any rules about where and how the eye is or should be directed, or to say how important it is vis a vis other factors in composition - overall balance, inclusion of interesting features like clouds and chimneys - I just accept that what to me looks right may not do so to others and vice versa.