Merry-go-round #3

I don't see how people can like your other merry-go-round photos (also excellent) better than this one. This one has raining silohuettes. Excellent framing and choice of exposure.

Wow!

I like the photo, but I find theres a certain halo'ing around all the black pieces of the picture. is this scanning remnants, or as intended?

 

Nice composition however, keep up the good work.

Unreal - superb. I admire your talent. This is actually something I would like to have. Do you sell your work?/

Bravo, Rainer!

Quite frankly I am impressed.The selection of film and shutter speed and framing is great...Bravo!

This image gives me a sense of movement and order, as if a hidden hand was behind it pulling each string in harmonious concert.

Wow. This is a beautiful photograph which I would love to have as a poster nicely framed and hung in my living room. A beautiful composition indeed!

 

Sincerely,

Cui

An inspiring and extraordinary photo. Rainer, How do you take it? Are you sitting on the ride yourself? The photo taking process should be interesting.

I'm not sure I like the combination of high contrast and blurry edges. I beg to disagree with the elves - not in the POW selection, but in their claim that it bestows a "moody" feeling to the image. I personally think it looks a little smudged. Did this come out as such from the negative, or is it the result of later manipulation? Not that it matters - the photographer is entitled to his choices on the final output - but I'm just curious.

 

Now let's talk about just a few of the things that I like about this photo (there are too many, I'll stick to the key points)

 

This is a truly original composition. A very unreal photo of a very live and real subject. Abstract but complex. Frozen, lingering, yet full of the power indicated by the imagined motion.

 

But what is perhaps the most wonderful property of the photograph is an apparent space collapse, an illusion whereby the background object appears to have lost its distance with the foreground. This depth-perception warping makes an image so unreal that I'm literally forced to believe I'm actually dreaming. People usually pay good money to buy illegal substances for that effect. Thank you for sharing it for free! ;)

The foreground and background compressing does make this wild. Great work. Lots to look at and ponder. Congrats.

I like it. I dont think the composition is particularly original though the treatment plainly is. I like the blurring, chain detail and arrangement of shapes and whatever has been done to this shot so as to make it look like it isnt a photograph and is without a background; like its fuzzy felt I had when I was a kid, only made magnetic so it can attach to my fridge door. Theres a lot of line and shape but none of this conveys motion to me. Its more like the lines and shapes are held in place like the hands and numerals around a giant wrought iron clock face. But the clock has stopped and Im gazing at something frozen in time. So Im getting a sensation of being regressed towards my childhood. Just one blinks worth from when I was about 9. The sort of blink where you dont get the colour but only an impression. Neat piece of work.

This photo image says much about the geometric construction of the universe and the manner in which particulate rain down upon us continuously. It is a tiny glimpse into the mathematical composition of our world.

It's an exciting image but, if possible, wouldn't it have been so

much more striking and less confusing without the inclusion of

the wheel in the background? Wouldn't there be an

enhancement of that 'raining' effect?

The pattern is quite interesting, but the blur has an undifferentiated [/photoshopped] feeling about it and adds nothing. I think I would have preferred to see sky, and some chiaroscuro modelling of the backlit people and machinery.

Wow - I love everything about this image. The treatment adds a dreamlike/

remembered nostolgia feel and adds to the complex weave of lines and

shapes to give emotive impact. Nice.

Rainer, Will you share your secret as to how you create the "halo" effect, that slightly darkened and blurred area surrounding the dark object? This is a fabulous photograph.

Superb photo. The composition works great for me. I normally prefer soft

photos, but the high contrast here carries a lot of softness, almost tenderness.

Thanks a lot for this contribution ;-)

Hey, I recognize that effect! I use it myself in the wet darkroom. But I'm not gonna spill the beans, tho' I've discussed it in some of the forums. Let's wait and see if Rainer wants to discuss technique or just keep us wondering. Perhaps the technique is different from mine, tho' the end result is similar.

 

Very effective application of the technique, far more appropriate than any of the images on which I've used it.

 

(Standard Disclaimer: This is not a critique. I no longer participate in photo.net critiques. If this had been an actual critique you would have been notified to seek shelter.)

It's from using a diffuser on the enlarger.

I think it's an interesting take on the subject, but it screams "PHOTOSHOPPED!" to me. That's not a bad thing, mind you, just not my taste. Of course, I'm assuming it is photoshopped. I'm an amateur and haven't seen an effect like this come out the darkroom before.

At first I want to thank you for all your comments.

My intention on shooting this series was to create dynamic photos using the universal rules of diagonal placed elements.

On this pictures I used a combination of a strong blured layer multiplied with the original photo, that was lightly sharpened in the background layer, to give some kind of speed to the picture. The shutter speed of the original photo was a little too fast to give a natural blurring to the photo (see 1st picture of my B&W folder).

To get a natural blurring with sharpen details I would have to use a grey filter and flash light - but no flash light is strong enough to lighten the whole area including the background objects.

This combination of different blurred and sharpened layers can give your photos some kind of 3D effect.

In 1979 when I shot this photo I had my own dark room and experimented a lot with different techniques - Hard paper, soft paper, expose a hard developed photo on a soft paper ...

This time no one had a PC to enforce photos. We often used 2 Dias in one frame to combine interesting, unusual photos.

Congratulations on a truly outstanding image, Rainer. We have all seen thousands of such fun fair shots, but very few I've seen were that interesting, and almost none was this "pure". I love the parallel lines that all point to the big wheel. A few straight lines, half a circle - that's it. Nothing more was needed, and what's not needed can easily turn to be a distraction is such places. Well seen, well done.

Generally, I'm one of those folks who find silhoettes rather boring, BUT... not this one. Not at all. The network of lines makes for a wonderful subject per se in this particular instance.

Now about the blur... Well it can be achieved both in PS and in a wet darkroom. I concur with Lex to say that it is here wonderfully appropriate. We would rather expect a motion blur or everything sharp on such a subject, yes you chose the less obvious post-production, and to me, it works - big time ! As somebody said above, it seems to "freeze" a moment in time and to bring about the magic of our childhood's dream, in a very nostalgic way. I truly envy you for managing such a pure and beautiful shot in such difficult circumstances. A shot you can be really proud of ! Congrats.

Aaron wins the kewpie doll. There is nothing about this image that "screams Photoshopped." The effect can easily be duplicated - and has been - by using a diffuser under the enlarger lens.

 

I borrowed the trick from Ron Prager, who discussed its use in a Shutterbug article a few years ago. Specifically, it's split-filter printing with diffusion. I used to have a Presentation on photo.net with a discussion of my adaptation of Ron's technique along with some examples.

 

But nothing I've done with the technique matches Rainer's exquisitely restrained and appropriate use of the same effect. It matters not how the effect was accomplished - it simply works.

First of all, I love your folder and I do like this image, although it is not my favorite of your pictures. I have the sense that this is perhaps a bit overworked, and I would like to see the original shots from which it was made, as well as the intermediate steps in the creation of the finished product--but none of that is really meant to be too critical. I do like it, and the composition is brilliant.