Negative Space pt 2
Tracey gave me some creative coaching about this image. She advised me to focus more on the candles and less on the glass and to leave some more space around the candle-flames, to give the red glow around the flames more room. I reframed one of the shots of the same table and think i managed to effectively follow Tracey's advice.

The first image has been cropped a bit too tight, it feels somewhat 'cramped'. The eye is immediately drawn to the smudged empty glass in the center, and there is no 'natural' way it is lead to the candles on the left. In the second shot the candles are the main focus, they have more room in the frame and take the focus away from the smudgy wineglass.

The midweek challenge was about tilting the scale. It is possible to use negative space excessively, or almost not at all in an image, to create confusion and/or curiosity about the actual size of your subject.

The subject in the first image are the tiny autumn leaves, floating on the water. Because there is no information about the size and shape of the water-surface, it seems to go on indefinitely, the leaves might be floating on a huge lake or a small pond, the leaves themselves therefore might be tiny or big, there is no way to know for sure....

In the second image the negative space (the space in the top left of the image, including and behind the white railing) is very small, and has a completely different texture and color compared to the subject: the red stones of the wall and the grey stones of the street. (so in this image positive and negative space are not defined by color, but by the predominant material) The composition of the elements suggests that the red wall and grey street stretch out indefinitely on both sides of the image, this is exaggerated by the tiny piece of negative space on the top left.

Here the same confusion about size is evoked by a lack of negative space. The autumn leaf is huge and fills almost the whole frame. But common sense indicates that it will not be as big as the building in the second image. That building seems to go on forever in all directions, so there is no indication about its size either. It might be 10 times bigger and taller than what's in the image, or it might be not much bigger than what you see. The bark on the third image also fills the frame, but we all know a bit about trees and can visualize how tall or broad the tree might be. Probably a lot larger than the leaf and not as large as the building....