Photo Within a Circle

In my brief I specifically asked for entries not to feature round subjects. You’ve circumvented that request by cleverly entering a semicircular composition. The top half of your wisteria frame neatly follows the contours of a circle with the leading wire lines echoing the lines of the path below. This rule-bending horticultural garden photo culminating at the door of the distant house works so well that I can’t imagine any other shape doing it justice other than within a circle.

The complimentary juxtaposition of the square windowpanes inside your round frame immediately caught my eye. Despite some abstract distortion there is more than enough detail to recognise the tiny cyclamen flower displayed in a shot glass vase. The perfectly centred lines are what makes your careful composition gel so well. Your photo certainly disproves the theory that you can’t place a square peg into a round hole.

This beautiful abstract colour photo of oil bubbles escaping from a liquid universe would look great within any shape but by placing them inside a circle you’ve intensified the photo’s rounded effervescence. Looking like giant gas balls frothing at the edge of a foaming planet completes your macro fizziness with a lot of technicolour zestfulness.

I’ve probably seen thousands of photos of male peacocks openly displaying their colourful plumage. And, quite honestly, if I’ve seen one I’ve seen them all. But, centred within a circle makes this a uniquely different take on a very ubiquitous subject. It helps that it’s a sharp photo taken with a high enough ISO to freeze the shaking tail feathers. With your circular conversion highlighted against an ultramarine background you’ve begrudgingly converted me into being a fan of fanned feathers - well, at least a fan of your winning combination.

Landscapes work particularly well set within circles and your semi-abstract forest view immediately drew me in. The path running across your photograph allows the eye to savour the delights of the autumnal colours bordering its route. I can imagine this being one of a set of painted porcelain plates adorning the walls of a dining room. These sunlit trees bathed in red, green and gold colours leave one with a welcome sense of peace and tranquillity.

The three negative diamond spaces are what makes your photograph. It’s what’s not there that draws one’s attention. You’ve used your repeated flipped images of coloured pencils remarkably well to create two vertical zigzag lines meeting in the middle. Your pinpoint accuracy is exactly what is needed with this type of layout as one sharp pencil out of place would have completely blunted your composition. Your strict attention to pencil detail has certainly drawn favour from me.

What works so very well in this photo is that all the elements of the composition are made up of rectangles and straight lines. This is in direct contrast to the curvature of the circle your photo is placed inside. Clear, simple and extremely effective leading lines walk us through the museum corridor to the other end of the building. The colour tones achieved by inverting the photo has turned the negative hues into positive blues.

Your photo looks like a doodle mindlessly drawn whilst on the other end of the telephone listening to someone giving a long, boring monologue. It took me a while to twig that these were actual twigs when your abstract scribble drew my attention. What I originally thought was a flipped half image turns out to be the dry brown tree reflected in water. Well done on your intriguing doodle-like capture and if I were a psychoanalyst I could probably get inside your photographic mindset by reading your Rorschach like ink blob.