This is the last shot of the day I took during my workshop on the Dorset Coast with Doug Chinnery and Anthony Spencer.  This isn’t my normal sort of work - and in fact is exactly why I went on the course in the first place.

I set my shot up with time running out before the gates.  To try and get the foreground interest amongst all the busy rocks I chose to include the big rock below, looked ok in the view finder but now its converted to mono it seems to have taken over the shot somewhat.  What do you think?

So to try and balance it out I tried various crops, the first being to keep the same format but to crop in and get rid of the rocks altogether.  I like this but everything seems to be a little too close now - its a busy image anyway and this just seems to add to the business

So how about making a feature of the rock, really make it the star of the frame - here’s an attempt using a square crop.  I think it dominates it too much really

So I plumped for a 2:1 format shot, taking most of the rock out and giving lots of space to the left to trya nd make the scene a little less busy and a little more tranquil.