>>3151297>disprove anything i said.A'ight.
> terrible snapshitFirst off, it's not terrible. If you think it's terrible, that indicates that you're probably a pretty shitty photographer. I'll get to that when I talk about how the rest of your post is idiotic, though.
Second, it's not a snapshot (or snapshit). Snapshot implies that it's a boring subject and/or badly composed. It is, in fact, a shot of Marine One taking Richard Nixon away from the White House on his last day as president. Pretty momentous subject, which just by itself belies the "snapshit" criticism.
> badly composed, badly weighted, [...] awful focal lengthCompositionally, you’ve got three main elements. From foreground to background: the three Marines, the helicopter, and the Washington Monument. The marines are the primary subject (they’re in sharpest focus, they’re in the foreground, and they’re fully in frame) and they eye is drawn to them first. The departing Marine One helicopter serves as a backdrop to this, and after the eye takes that in, it continues around to see the context of Washington, D.C., as the setting. The visual weight of the clump of sharply-focused marines, the slightly hazier and larger helicopter, and the Washington Monument guide the viewer through the scene to take in the whole thing. The fact that Marine One is slightly cut off at the edges isn’t a flaw, it’s a very deliberate choice that helps make it clear that the marines are the primary subject of the photo.
The focal length—a telephoto, looks like, and probably a fairly long one—compresses the scene so that the marines and Marine One seem a lot closer than they were. With anything wider, the helicopter wouldn’t be so much a background as it would be a small background element.
