Balance in confinement

" The picture is perfectly sharp: just look at her eyes! "
Hal;

If this photo looks perfectly sharp to you , I hate to think what it would take for your eyes to notice something being soft.

the image is wonderfully done, no doubt!!! But guys,have you looked at the girl's face??? Im just speachless what she's able to do with her feet... wow that's just amazing. Can you imagine how hard it must be to stay in that position and if you take a look on her face, she's calm, like it would be nothing special. It's amazing!!!

Q: What's more pleasing than processing photo work on your own project. A: Diddling and refining someone else's photo sometimes. One can learn from the different variations. No small value. Especially when viewers express a thoughtful comment on interpretation. Like the tour guide in the National Gallery (Art researches did X rays of Michelango frescoes and found some significant alterations and changed sketches under the finished coat.

Hats off go Scott for his welcome to the fiddling. It can feed a useful learning process to get other people's ideas I I am sticking to my view that photography can be a communal enterprise...i.e personal vision can be refined by an appreciative group. Does not rob individual expression.Scott can say " I like it as presented. It says what I wanted to say! Period. " ( One of my gallery pictures of an old colleague in a blazer is regarded "warm" for the skin tone. But I like the feel of that reddish color. Yet I understand the comment. That is about all I have to add to this discussion. Which I find most interesting. gs

Before considering a different crop, in a case like this, I would, as far as I am concerned, look at what I feel about the subject matter and the way the photographer dealt with it - on an emotional level, on a conceptual level, on the level of aesthetics, and on a technical level.
Emotional level : this picture is somehow intriguing, but not really, as I soon see a contrieved pose that actually means nothing - except perhaps to look strange and to excite my curiosity as a viewer. In short, I see a cheap trick in this pose : a pose meant to leave us wondering about... well, about nothing special, precisely. So I end up not being very interested after 30 seconds viewing.
Conceptual level : this picture says nothing, to me.
Aesthetics : Not bad... The light is very simple and carries very little weight. It just lights the subject in a decent way. It adds nothing to what's shown and does not spoil the subject either. It is "okay", not ugly, nor great. It is sober, and unfortunately, sober and simple images are only great when they are very sensitive, clever, emotionally or conceptually strong - which this one isn't, in my view.
Technique : the more easy a picture is, technically speaking, the most perfect it should be - imo. In this particular picture, the ground and background are not as neat as the subject matter, but the worst bit is that the left half of this background was blurred very poorly in Photoshop, whereas the background was left untouched at the bottom on the right side : you can see the limit between touched up and untouched areas under the model's but. And so, in my opinion, this picture fails technically - whereas it didn't succeed completely in any other way.
Conclusion : what I'm left with is a "not too bad" but technically poor and fairly uninteresting contrieved and meaningless picture - well, in my opinion of course. I don't find it awful but I'm not interested, and end up disappointed by the poorly performed photoshop work. I can certainly see quite a few pictures by the same photographer that I would have liked better than this one. This POW leaves me with feeling of an "unfinished" photographic venture, sorry.

Moderator note: I've removed some postings from this thread -- some duplicates, some off-topic stuff. I've tried to keep all postings that seem to help the discussion along. Sorry if I've been a bit to ruthless.


Please try to keep the discussion focussed on the image, not the selection process or the vailidity of other people's opinions. Thanks!

Agreed.

Bill P.

at first glance: Breathtaking

at further study: Deep

In awe, Sunny