the image goes so well with the purpose, ganesh. the blur 'n vulture facing down makes it more intense 'n sad. very artistic feel to this.
regards.

Very interesting portraiture of human emotion through this image. I normally enjoy square crop but here I am more inclined for the full image as I think it gives a better scale to the this image. I do read often about body language, which I find very interesting and try understand more about body postures and different personalities. But never looked at it this way, thank you very much for sharing

Revisiting this image as the comment by @rahultailor resurfaced the image on the comments page.

On the image itself :

* This is my view, please disregard it if you find it out of place. It's a fine frame already.

The square crop is off somehow. The negative space especially behind the bird is causing an imbalance. The square crop would have worked if the image was horizontally flipped, the bird having empty space in front of it. This way the head down posture is amplified.

The vertical crop seems like a better fit. More braches and more empty space to amplify the subject. However, I would still prefer the image horizontally flipped to have more space in front of the bird than behind it.

The blur is very effective and apt too.



On the relation between shapes, postures to emotions, and the emergent virtual grammar which can be used as a tool for visual artists :

This relationship seems to be something that has been taken for granted. Without questioning why a certain shape means a certain emotion evoked. Maybe this coding is as basal as they come and is built into us. Hence the universality and effectiveness. You don't need to learn to identify it either. Same way body language works. We consciously might not understand/identify human postures and correlated emotion being signaled but we subconsciously process it and respond to it accordingly.

Similar to posture/shape even colors have some coding ( as you have noted in " Goethe's Theory of Colors " post )

As to if they can be codified to an extent to be used as tools of visual grammar, I am not 100% sure. As you mentioned the hard formula is difficult. But I also think it gets tricky if we use the secret sauce that we might find repeatedly. I think so because humans also have a tendency to reject formula/repetition. Or it might work continuously. It can be such a strong mapping. Worthy of an attempt.

Interested in hearing any thoughts you might have Ganesh on this since the post was made 7 years ago.



Also, here are some interesting reads I found

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6749614/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6069791/

Hi Vageesha, thanks for the interesting links and sharing your thoughts. About the space behind, it was a conscious decision. I thought/think it enhances a negative/sad feeling compared to leaving space at the front. If I remember it right, I had images with space at front. I am undecided on square vs. portrait. That said, for my tastebuds, square, as presented, seem to give a bit more focused attention on the bird compared to portrait one above with more of the tree to look at. May be landscape version may work even better.