Stills

akikana: I couldn't decide whether the sea horizon and the wall merging was a strength or a weakness. It wasn't deliberate. We learn, we learn.
 

The model Scottish Blackface looks as big as a Suffolk! Welcome to Arran. I'm intrigued by your tonal range in the conversion - it invites thoughts about the time of day or the weather or what you were feeling: it's quite difficult getting to grips with that dark sky, against which the sheep's fleece is bright. Maybe that horizon/wall top convergence contributes to the unease. I like it for that power to unsettle but I am none the wiser.
 

John E: I have a frame with more realistic tones - i.e. with the sheep burnt out and the wall/sea/sky more like they were in reality. I don't find it particularly expressive though. This frame was exposed to keep the "fleece" in the dynamic range and everything else just fell where it did. In processing I lifted the sea wall tones just a little but did nothing else. It was a hot, humid and windless day. About as unlike the image of the Scottish Isles as it is possible to be weatherwise.

I'm not sure much of this went through my mind at the point of exposure, but this is supposed to be an unsettling image. Part puzzle (what is that sheep?) and part unease. A continuation of my defence of the non-luminous landscape (link).
 

It's not just the sea wall that's lined up with the horizon, the top of the sheep's back lines up with the distant horizon. I think the convergence of all these lines confuses the sense of scale, and perhaps that's why this works so well.

I'd like to see a little more detail in the shadows of the sea wall.
 

I quite like the lining up of the wall with the horizon and the captured effect on the see that the wall has. Rough on the outside, smooth on the inside. Again I miss out on the tension, something that I often seem to struggle with. What I do get instead is sadness. How long is that sheep going to have to wait for whatever it is it's waiting for?
 

It is the humour in the incongruity that first stuck me and has stayed with me the more I’ve looked at this.

I tried to take some pictures of sheep grazing on sand dunes (incongruous), as has been said elsewhere they are awkward animals to photograph, they don’t co-operate. It doesn’t look like this one was moving about much!
 

I suppose that approaching this strictly realistically your explanation about the weather conditions goes some way to explaining the tension, brought out by your conversion. Somehow, I feel that I would be saying the same things even if the sheep weren't to be there - for me it is an almost irrelevant prop: my sense of humour won't rise to the occasion! For me it is an intriguing study in the use of black and white.