Stills

It was snowing lightly and the train windows were pretty dirty.
 

This is what I said on Photostream:

Anyway, Matt Alofs has just put a wonderful picture on his blog. Not only is it a fine picture, but it is an excellent learning tool. Cover up the car with your thumb and see how the picture changes. The composition changes dramatically in that the point of eye contact with the picture moves, but also the nature of the picture changes. It loses a lot of chronological and documentary content. The car is just a few percent of the picture area, so it is hardly dominant, but how many of us would have waited for the road to be empty?
 

An interesting observation.

I think there was a time when I would have waited for the car to go, but now there are probably two possibilities; I recognise the car is there, wait for it to go and then think I wish I'd taken it with the car in or I keep waiting for that compositional quirk to arrive, it doesn't and I don't take the picture! :-) Saying that I do think I am now prepared for my preconceived concept of an image to be bent by the inclusion of reality, the intrusion of the detritus of daily life.

The comment about the strength of a simple element in an image having a large effect reminds me of a Turner watercolour of a river, a castle on a hill and a cow watering in the river. The act of concealing the cow makes the picture 'fall apart' and become almost unrecognisable as a landscape.

On the subject of the mist with balls, I probably shouldn’t allow my technical head to dominate my arty head. I have just been called punctilious on another forum, I’m not sure it was a compliment!
 

I'm not sure that the picture changes as dramatically as Colin says when the car is covered up but to a certain extent it is psychological: if a car only passes on that road every half an hour, or less frequently, then this picture inverts normality.

But that is angels on a pinhead nitpicking. Irrespective of the geometry of the road and tree line, this conveys the type of landscape in that part of Europe very well, underscored by the title. Pictorially, the car skews the weight of viewing a little too heavily to the left hand side, and down from the farmhouse, and is aesthetically not quite as pleasing even if, intellectually, its presence adds something to the "...chronological and documentary content...".

As a shot from a train, the car points up the relative isolation of the house: the world passes you by. Shooting through the train window also makes the scene more atmospheric.
 

I get the point about the car and agree that it changes the picture. Still not sure how I feel about it though. Will need to revisit this a few times.

Speaking of being punctilious, the ballsy mist bothers me much less than the little black dot between the second and third posts -- I kept trying to remove it from my monitor!
 

The black dot could be a bird about to land on the wire, but it is about a metre too high.
 

Not sure what the black dot was - think I assumed it was a bird - but a couple of seconds with the healing brush got rid of it.

The mist wouldn't be so easy to deal with, and I'm not sure that I would try to anyway. I almost didn't post this here because of the mist, but over the last few days, I'v come to feel the mist is integral to the shot. Atmospheric, as John said.
 

I tried to make it into a bird, but unsuccessfully, so I'm pleased you decided to remove it. A new morning is giving me new appreciation for this image. I agree that the so-called mist is atmospheric.
 

I am sad about the passing of the bird. Has anyone told it that it has ceased to exist?
 

Closer inspection of the negative suggested that the bird was only in our minds, but it's a good thing I'm not a journalist, or I would have had to resign over this. Which brings up an interesting philosophical question; if a bird exist through a flaw in the negative, is fixing the flaw unethical, and does it cause the bird to stop existing?

Some days I wish I had gone on to become a philosophy professor.
 

The bird was eaten by Schrödinger's Cat.
 

There are two strong triangles at work here: the car - the junction - the farmhouse; and the farmhouse along the hedgerow and back to the junction. I would therefore contend that the sky is a little too dominant with such lack of detail/information.

What is contained within the triangles is simplicity. The composition holds very well together and without that car you lose one of those triangles.

Those telegraph poles look mighty lonely.
 

Guy, point well taken about the sky. Less sky would have meant disrupting the line across the bottom of the frame though, so I'm not sure there's a solution to that one.

Thanks for the comments everyone.