aaa salisbury, north carolina and vicinity The Mocking Mural

very startling shot, like a frame from a movie, not sure the story being told but it does resonate

Shot from the car as I drove by this gentleman walking in front of themural.

--Lannie

Thanks, Bill. Here is the original, resized and corrected for brightness and contrast. (I accidentally shot this--and many other subjects--with the exposure compensation set at -3 f-stops, and it was dark, dark, dark when I first looked at it--and I was shooting big JPEGs, not RAW. Some of the shots could not be salvaged.)

 

--Lannie

I like the spirit of your home town. It reminds me of John Crosely photo "The progression of age":

http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=6536499

 

 

Well, Krissy, thank you, but I have only lived in this little town about two and one-half years, and so I really cannot think of it as my home town.

 

In this photo, one sees an indirect allusion to some problems that were common to the southern U.S.: problems of race relations. Nor have those problems vanished, although things have certainly come a long way during my lifetime.

 

Salisbury is a nice place, and I do like its small "downtown" area.

 

--Lannie

I like your shots on the right. The above one is a constructed image out of a shot. An emergency-option. So, no option for the man is rather healthy. Think even the original much more interesting. Regards from the Netherlands! :)

Thanks, Olaf. Yes, I like the mural as well. Next time I shoot it I am going to check my shots on the spot, to be sure that my settings were correct.

 

Don't forget, though, that a shot is a constructed image out of part of reality. A constructed image via a crop simply occurs on the next view, a more prolonged one, not always a better one, but definitely an image that one did not either see or construct in one's own mind on the first view.

 

So, they (the original and the crop) are two different constructs for me, nothing more, nothing less--and neither has any a priori advantage over the other for having been seen through the viewfinder, or even before.

 

--Lannie

Afterall: shooting is cropping the reality. The greatest challenge for us is doing that at once on the spot. So, for some reasons not getting that properly done, a huge crop afterward, will leave mixed feelings. ;) Thanks for reacting! Olaf

PDE

Thanks, guys.

 

Olaf, it certainly is nice to get it right the first time. On this day, however, I put the 24 f/1.4 on there and said, "I am going to shoot just this lens today."

 

There was no way to get closer on this one. I shot the guy as he walked by, but there was no way to get him close enough with a 24mm lens from a barely moving car. (I think that the ISO was 1600 with the sun at my back, and so you can imagine what the shutter speed must have been.)

 

I like to think of the attempted shot as our first discovery that we try to frame, and whatever else we find when we get home and blow it up is like a second discovery, sometimes better, sometimes not. To me, cropping huge digital files and trying to find a second "framing" qua crop is like going out and shooting all over again.

 

For me there is absolutely no stigma in cropping. That is one reason that I have a 16.7 megapixel camera. I anticipate being able to crop to get what I want, and thus I know that, for purposes of uploading to the web at least, I will have plenty of pixels after all kinds of crops. I never have understood the fetish of framing only with the viewfinder, one of the crudest instruments ever made. I prefer to make my final framings on a computer screen, at leisure, and with the best technology at my disposal.

 

--Lannie