"Picnic Over Waikiki"

Arthur, Mark stated in the original comments:

"I did execute a digital grad on the sky, meaning I selected the sky, created a layer mask with the selection and then changed the blend mode of the layer mask to multiply. I then reduced the opacity to taste."

So, there was some effort to reduce the value of the sky but then, one can also do things that can mitigate lens issues, such as vignettes, that can over darken the edges of the frame. Lots of tools, lots of decisions!

<<<Thought-provoking photographs of the human condition just come more naturally with humans rather than the landscape in which we live, IMO. That only seems natural.>>>

While this may be true, there are exceptions. HERE'S a landscape that is compelling, not pretty, beautiful in its own way though not in the postcard sense, and tells me much about the human condition. I feel very much not a human who is pictured here (since no human inhabits the picture), but the human who has given it to me and the human who I am when I am in touch with it. Vision and perspective are eminently human and a human doesn't have to be pictured in order for some aspect of humanity, and much more, to be portrayed. This photo won't be everyone's cup of tea, by a long shot, but for me, it has the quality of soul.

_______________________________

There is a level of technical expertise and know-how to this week's POTW which is noteworthy. In "the olden days" there was little difference made between craft and art and craft was upheld as a supreme human accomplishment. The more emotional sides of "art" came a little later and added layers to craft that were previously un- or under-appreciated.

Mark:

This image provides clear and convincing evidence of te value of a picnic overlooking Waikiki. It has several strong elements, as colleagues already have identified, so there's no need for me to be repetitious. I will say that the sky is so spectacular that it almost prevents the viewer from noticing other elements, like the couple on the blanket.

My best,

michael

The word "compelling" has come up more than once in this thread. What is compelling to one person might not be to another. In addition, there is the question as to how persons are using the word.

Mark, I doubt that wilderness or ocean shots are all that compelling to some persons, but for those of us who have spent much of our lives seeking out the wild places and the vistas afforded by both mountains and oceans, your shots are as compelling as any I have seen.

Here is yet another example, one more that not only compels the viewer to look at the picture, but impels him or her to step into the picture and become a part of the Nature that you have sought out so successfully:

[LINK]

I hate to see such work derogated as merely "pretty pictures." We have lost touch with nature, in my opinion, in precise proportion to how small the effect of such vistas is upon us.


Even with the Waikiki-Honolulu shot, my eye is yet drawn to the Nature that lies beyond the urban sprawl.

[LINK]


--Lannie

For me, it's the case that photos of something are not the same as the something. So, while I generally appreciate nature and incredible vistas, it's rare that I appreciate in any kind of similar way photos of them. Just me. Certainly not a general rule or meant to apply to anyone else or to the current photo in particular. Similarly, I may really appreciate good photos of war, for example. And yet I don't want to experience it first hand.

When I use "compelling" I mean it has established a significant connection for me. And it's usually more a connection to the photo as photo than to the subject of the photo, though that certainly varies, depending on the subject and the photo.

Well, Fred, when it comes to nature, there certainly is no substitute for being there, but I do think that a good nature photo can sometimes evoke in me a similar kind of emotional appeal as the reality--but simply to a lesser, weaker extent.

I do know a lot of photos that are compelling in the sense that you use the term, I believe, without any claim of an appeal to what they represent (if anything). The easiest example to trot out is abstracts, although there might be better examples. I have a hunch that you have thought a lot more about this than I have. Certainly most abstracts are valued in and of themselves, as photos, not for some reality which they represent.

The scene you linked to above is one, I believe, that is compelling in and of itself. I hope that I have not misunderstood you.

--Lannie

I thought this video interview with Joel Meyerowitz might give a little insight into the discussion regarding the nature of how photographs work depending on their nature. The idea that there are images that contain subject and ones where the content moves beyond the edges of the image.

<<<there certainly is no substitute for being there>>>

Lannie, what I'm talking about are photos that are not substitutes, weak or strong, for being there and are not even seen that way. The only there is the presence of the photo. It's not about abstraction. It's about being present, about NOT being somewhere else. Put me in the photo -- NOT in the landscape which is by now somewhere else -- and I may be "compelled."

John A, I can certainly understand the notion of tenuous relationships involving people, especially many people, or I suppose even solitary people in their environment. I have a harder time understanding the notion of tenuous relationships involving, say, a mountain, except with regard to light and weather. What do you suppose Joel would say to this? How do I avoid making a mountain an object?

A photo of landscape may have reasons urban, rural or both. A photo of landscape should lead the observer to do a reading of the terrain photographed, identifying the main geographical accidents. The POW shows a landscape with a reason urban mixed with a reason rural. The urban part is dominant. The rural part participates only as frame. By reading the photo from the heaven, that this is a evening with sea very calm that allows the reflection of clouds. In terrestrial part, to the left, we observe mountainous elevations. From left to right we see a urban nucleus. The coastline of the urban nucleus is occupied by tall buildings. The inside of the urban nucleus is occupied by houses. Excluding the mountainous formations to the left, the urban nucleus photographed seems with a typical coastal city of Brazil’s Northeast. The author informs that it is a view of the urban nucleus of Honolulu taked in a dominant point located at Round Top Road. In fact, the POW allows the reading of the terrain photographed. The presence of two people, to the right, reinforces the bucolic atmosphere that the author attributed to the work.

I find that quite incomprehensible, Fred, if only because every photo is always interpreted in some context. Admittedly, that context might not be the body of the photographer's work. Rather, it might be something that the viewer brings to the photo. For me that context implies a dynamic rather than static dimension, and thus even the still life stands not in frozen time but in the flow of time itself. It is as if I were sitting and watching the flowers in the vase, as if I could almost hear the old clock tick-tocking over against the wall.

Mark's photos invite me into them, and this invitation also implies a dynamic or moving component: I find myself wanting to move into the photo, to step into it and follow some compelling element in the photo (as in his picture of a mountain scene that I linked to above):

[LINK]

The Photo of the Week likewise invites me to feel the wind against my face, or the sun on my skin.

Another essential component of anything that is both dynamic and human is narrative, for the narrative also moves through space-time, as in this video that we both have commented on before in another context:

[LINK]

I am not contradicting you, since I am still not sure that I understand your way of looking at a photo. Sure, any photo exists in the present and can be seen at times to be even an attempt to freeze the present, but it does not so much do that for me as redirect me to some earlier dynamic situation (if, for example, it is some nostalgic image of the past which derives its compelling content from the memory of that past.)

I find these questions about that which is compelling rather. . . compelling, worthy of a philosophy thread.

--Lannie

Given the likely etymological link between presence and present, I decided to look up present, but finally found myself at this link to a discussion of the metaphysics of presence.

[LINK]

All of this is far beyond the scope of this thread, but it is interesting that what appears at first as a simple landscape shot should be so rich with possible implications.

--Lannie

John A., I looked at the Joel Meyerowitz video and was immediately struck by these passages:

"I want the ephemeral connections between unrelated things to vibrate."

"There's plenty of stuff off-stage."

"You are seeing the world and the context [in a Leica/rangefinder, but not in an SLR]."

"I am photographing. . . the relationships between things. . . I don't want copies of objects. I want the ephemeral connections between unrelated things. . . ."

"The play is always in the potential."

There is much more.

Thank you, John. Even a simple photo such as this week's Photo of the Week is not a mere copy of anything. Everyone who sees it brings other things into it.

--Lannie

The post timed out before I had finished what I was writing:

Thank you, John. Even a simple photo such as this week's Photo of the Week is not a mere copy of anything. Everyone who sees it brings other things into it. I could not help but think of Pearl Harbor to the west of where the photo was shot, of how Honolulu might have looked on the first Sunday morning of December in 1941, etc., of how it might have felt to have been in the middle of those events under that gorgeous tropical sky and cloud reflections, which, though changing, seem more constant than the changing face of Waikiki and Honolulu, and indeed the entire island, over the intervening years.

All of that was what the photo suggested to me tonight. The first time I saw it, once I got past seeing the obvious and immediate content, I thought of the ocean off of my own hometown of Charleston, South Carolina--at times just as glassy and tropical looking as the ocean in the posted photo. Such photos as this can evoke so many different responses, even in the same person--over time.

--Lannie

<<<Even a simple photo such as this week's Photo of the Week is not a mere copy of anything.>>>

Lannie, yes. It may help additionally to replace the word "copy" in your own sentence so it reads "Even a simple photo such as this week's Photo of the Week is not a mere reminiscence of anything."

As you noted, Meyerowitz talked about the ephemeral nature of relationships, as opposed to photos being copies of objects. You are emphasizing what you are reminded of (the sun and the wind). Now look again at Billy's photo? Do you feel the sun and the wind or something else? Postcards are precisely meant to remind us of places we've been. Other kinds of photos aren't necessarily about that. Billy's landscape is a place I have not been (and by place, I don't mean just physical location), and it doesn't particularly remind me of anything, and that's why it's compelling to me. Reminiscence and postcards are of the past. Compelling photos, for me, project into the future . . . are about potential more than memory, what might be more than what's been.

Thanks, Fred, for that insight.

I was just back at last week's Photo of the Week discussion forum.

Theater, indeed! Holly cow. Shades of Psycho--and I am not talking about Gerry but about the identity of mother and son, at least in the finale of that movie--and the finale of the thread as well.

--Lannie

Yes, possible futures have more power, I suppose, although I guess that the potential in question can be past, present, or future: "ephemeral connections between unrelated things" could go in any direction.

Your words remind me of some of the Philosophy of Photography threads--the concept of "artistic imagination" comes to mind as an alternative to "fantasy" in one of the threads. Since we cannot see the future, we cannot but try to imagine it, but what is fascinating about the future is that it can show the impotence of imagination. Our present discussion would have been unimaginable to me twenty years ago.

As for the present Photo of the Week, if one extrapolates urban growth yet another fifty-two years beyond Hawaii's statehood (2064), I wonder what the same scene might show.

But I don't mean to concretize what you are saying. . . .

"The need to simplify and concretize . . . was hardly acceptable to a mind fascinated by the . . . suggestiveness of ideas" --Arthur A. Cohen (found upon checking to see if "concretize" was an inadvertent neologism)

Then of course there is the potential inhering in alternative societal futures.

--Lannie

"How do I avoid making a mountain an object?"

You learn to photograph it for what else it is, not just what it is. What can it become.

I remember reading someone not long ago (maybe Robert Adams?) who summed it up in a way that maybe Fred was suggesting way up when we first got off onto this whole new tack. The comment essentially said that the successful photograph doesn't show you a place you would prefer being but makes you prefer being with the photograph. Essentially, that the photograph becomes something more than what it depicts and shows me something (often more like "stimulates something in me that is) out of my awareness.

Often, I believe ( and know at least in my case) that the conflict we often get into over landscapes here in the POW isn't that people on one side have different appreciation for the landscape but rather that they have different expectations from a photograph.

I can't even read through all the above egg head crap, nor be bothered by it.
For me:
Pleasant enough picture, slightly aqua sky and vivid greens, and red, reminds me of 'technicolor' 60s movies, and 'Blue Hawaii" I think I see Elvis.

I was looking through my collection of "favorite photographs" taken by other photographers, and some were favorites because they stirred deeply held feelings, emotions that were established in me by events and experiences I had before I was even a teenager. Earlier, Fred wrote, "When I use "compelling" I mean it has established a significant connection for me." I could relate to that. Then Fred added, "And it's usually more a connection to the photo as photo than to the subject of the photo...", and I couldn't relate to that (although he went on to say that often varies and depends on the photo). What the two of you said in this regard seems very similar, and it's a thought that I must admit I can't yet comprehend. But the ending of Mark's POW won't end my thinking about the thoughts that have been offered (I already have several thoughts, but this POW will be ending soon -- the week has run out, and I have time only to thank Mark for a photo I've enjoyed and others for the discussion it has produced).

Marie H makes a great point that had bothered me about the otherwise pleasant image - it didn't have a color balance that appealed to me. 60s technicolor is her interesting reason. Here, with apologies to Mark, is a re-balancing for color cast. Not sure it works on your screen, but it elevates the quality of the image for me, to that of somewhat more pleasant, if not dramatic (which may not have been Mark's purpose anyway). I can relate to fred's postulate about photo versus subject (sorry, Fred, loosely described by that phrase), but not for me in this case. A nice photo with a good feeling, nonetheless.

What I find kind of singular about this picture is how it blossoms when viewed at the large size. (I know others have commented on this.) But does anyone have any theories on why this is?

Martin, I have two suggestions, both based on optics.

The first is that when you open it up wide you are likely looking at it with a similar perspective to that of the taking lens. Pictures viewed at a distance that is close to that of the lens perspective and placement look better. The second reason is the obvious visibility of the detail within the image at larger size, which is obscured at smaller size owing to the limitations of the monitor (how much do you see in a thumbnail view?).

An addendum to my warming down of the image: I may have taken it a tad too far, but on the other hand the late afternoon warmth of the sun is still quite evident in the tall buildings and also in the foreground grass and the two picnickers.

I prefer your other photos... This one I find it is very "normal", good, but just good. Maybe technically, it is fabulous, I cannot tell. But as a man interested in beauty, I find it ...ordinary.

I like it. Hawaii no ka oi.