Long way home

Hi Tullius,

what I really like about this piece is the possibility to look very far into the distance. It creates a dreamy atmosphere and lets your mind drift off to some place else simply by looking at the picture.
With the woman sitting in the bottom left corner of the image, the focus is clearly on the beautiful landscape and since we kind of look at the back of her head it almost feels like we are seeing a place in her imagination. It is very beautifully composed (although the placement of the woman is maybe even a bit too far off-center), which makes the image particularly interesting. The beautiful colors and soft tones as well as the stars in the background support the dreamy atmosphere very well.

I must say the choice of clouds is not very realistic for several reasons. One of them being the fact that we look at them from the top, although this should not be possible. I can overlook this "issue" though because I believe it's one of the reasons why the view in the distance is so spectacular.
There are a few other problems with the clouds:
- They are lit from behind although the shadows in the landscape indicate a completely different position of the sun
- the clouds are probably shot from a plane and the scales betray that the clouds in the foreground should actually be very close to the camera
- with this perspective of the clouds I would not expect them to be cut off right behind the hill, but instead covering the hills and hovering very closely above the ground
- with the clouds blended like this, the hill in the distance actually looks like a cliff, where the landscape ends and instead clouds begin, but again, why do the clouds end there so suddenly?

Now to the blending of the woman and the bags.
It looks very well done and almost seamless, although here too I can spot a few minor things that could be improved:
- the woman and bags should cast deeper shadows. By comparing with the landscape you can notice that the shadows cast by the grass in the middleground are equally dark or even darker - that should not be the case. It's the other way round, the contrast becomes stronger the closer the object is to the viewer. Look how dark the small pockets in the earth in the foreground are - the shadows should be a bit closer to that.
- the lighting direction of the woman compared to the sun seems to be fine, but it still could use some postworking. It is obvious that the photo was shot in a room with some global lighting. Again you can compare with the grass and notice how dark the areas are which are not facing the sun. The same should be happening for the girl; she won't only cast a shadow on the ground, parts of her body will also be covered in it. Especially since the sun is standing so low in your picture
- one last thing concerning her pose: she seems to be leaning with her full weight against her bag, which makes me believe the bag has to be filled with cement to withstand the force and not be falling over. If she is instead supposed to be sitting on it, her butt should be covering more of the bag I think, otherwise, again, it would fall over. But it's only a detail that makes it a bit unrealistic for me.

All in all this is a very beautiful piece with a great impact. I'm sorry that I had to be so picky with technicalities, but you can see it as a compliment - all these things will be considered minor by many people. <img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/b/b…" width="15" height="15" alt="" data-embed-type="emoticon" data-embed-id="366" title=" (Big Grin)"/> In rather minimal pieces like this one the devil is in the details.

I hope it helps! <img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/s/s…" width="15" height="15" alt="" data-embed-type="emoticon" data-embed-id="391" title=" (Smile)"/>