Thanks, Tim, for giving us your reasons for this tight crop. I do see the slumbering animal here, too.
And you right -- the context for this rock is well known, at least among other photographers, if not the general public.
I feel that Manely Beacon is probably one of the most photographed places in the world (judging from the gaggle of photographer on that mound in front of the viewing area). So, in choosing the shot that captured the spirit of that morning, I decided to, for this image, assume that the viewer already knows the greater context. I rather wanted to get at the sense of how the morning creeps across the scene. For me Manely Beacon is almost animal like in its contours in this image and it lies in the dark waiting for light to hit it.
Usually, your compositions a bit looser than mine. I have to break myself of the habit of cropping ruthlessly in the viewfinder. It is an instinctive act, and it works fine for you here, but we must be careful when we do this. We can always crop a loose composition into a tighter one. But we can't expand such compositions. Once the context is gone, it is gone. And interesting twist on this shot -- we are shooting at the same moment, side by side. You zoom in on the beacon, while I pull back a bit athttp://www.pbase.com/pnd1/image/75091832 . We have each confounded our tendencies here.
