Upside Down Boats

In my brief I suggested that upside down boats make wonderful abstract subjects never imagining that an aerial landscape could look like the scuffed surface of an upturned hull. I had to take a good look to work out what on earth I was seeing. Only on closer inspection did I notice the tiniest multicoloured beached canoes in the bottom right-hand corner of your clever drone composition. It’s remarkable how something so small can have such a strong impact. Well done for throwing all caution to the wind and entering a highly unique photograph with only the minimal reference to the brief.

It was only when I enlarged your photo did I realise it was way more than what looked like a beached whale. I love street art on whatever surface it’s painted but to see the underside of a boat used as a canvas was a first for me. On close perusal I recognised Hockney-esqe brush strokes recreating the Humber Bridge landscape in the distance. If it had been my photo I would have removed the branch resting against the boat and cropped out the debris in the foreground for a much cleaner and impactful composition. Nevertheless this is a great entry of a well-captured upturned boat.

Ordinarily the underside of this plain blue canoe, stored in what looks like a barn, wouldn’t stand a glimmer of chance in this competition. But you’ve photographed it at its most impactful, when the sun was shining through the open slats, to give your composition a beautiful striped-shadow effect. What amused me is that you’d caught a silhouette of a matchstick man waving his arms about, trying to draw attention to the fact that he’s helplessly pinned under the weight of the boat. I love how your composition has managed to include an unexpected touch of humour.

Without the dinghies in the foreground your sunset photo would have been another nice but otherwise plain landscape shot at dusk. The inclusion of the two upside down canoes has elevated your shot into something really special. In the pair of blue hulls you have caught the colours of the sunset making the boats seem like a cosy couple settling down for the night in the warmth of the passing day.

Your beautiful Canadian mountain scenery is good enough to stand out in any landscape photo competition. As one moves one’s eyes down, through the snow-capped reflection in the stillness of the frozen lake, they inevitably rest on the subjects of your entry - the upturned canoes artistically captured in the foreground giving your photo a sublime sense of peace and tranquillity

This beautifully scuffed red and blue canoe immediately stopped me in my tracks. Not because of the oversized rusty chain; the unusually proportioned composition or the very well-composed photo - it was the fact that I’d photographed the very same boat in Cemaes just three days before I saw your entry. You don’t mention where the photo was taken but it’s unmistakably been shot in Anglesey - what a weird coincidence! Make no mistake though, your photo is in my top ten purely on merit, not because our minds thought and shot alike.

When I set this challenge I certainly wasn’t expecting to see a person inside an upside down boat. Your superbly taken action shot of a kayaker performing a loop-the-loop manoeuvre has been caught at precisely the right moment. Your high shutter speed and ISO have ensured a pin sharp photo and the originality of your entry has secured you a very worthy top ten place.

The beauty of your photo is that, not only have you shown the boat upside down, but with its reflection you’ve also managed to capture it the right side up. The cleverness of your composition has the canoe resting in a bed of reeds whilst the mirrored half has it floating on the river. Your limited colour palette of sky blue and burnt umber offset each other perfectly in your two-fold narrative. Very clever and highly original photo - whichever way up you look at it.

What a great piece of abstract photography using upturned rowboats as the basis for your creative impute. The sharp images resting on the wooden boards are beautifully offset by their wavy reflections in the water. I particularly like the semi-diagonal crop zooming in on your selected area of focus. One might not immediately recognise your subject matter but the inclusion of the mooring cleat fixed to the jetty is the clue that gives your compositional game away.

You were faced with many choices on how to frame your composition when confronted with these upturned canoes. You opted for a photo using the time-honoured use of leading lines. Moving diagonally from red to white you’ve squeezed your foreground boats up tight against the blue boats in the far left-hand corner. The two stacks of boats conjure up many different comparabilities - for example I can see dolphins kissing on porpoise (joke) but your comparison to a bunch of bananas is as colourful as any.