_G106381 Wood Eye

I think there's a tendency, when you find a subject that is really fun to photograph, to post-process it according to your excitement rather than respecting the character of the subject matter IN the picture. I share Rod Hill's pleasure at this 'find' but I am not happy with the post, which, to my eye, contradicts the mood and mystery of natural wood and found eye.

That aside, I have been sitting here worrying (as a dog on a bone) over the down-tilted 'line' in the upper right. I think I end up liking it because it catches my eye and makes me stop and worry over it. If one is going to use this particular crop, then there needs to be something on that side to peg the otherwise less interesting content, and receive the thrust of the lighter upsurge of wood from the lower left. It also makes me pay attention to the connections between it and the orange obvious core of the picture.

[i think maybe this picture would be better if flipped horizontally, but I kind of resent it when such 'what-ifs' are suggested, since it takes one away from the picture in question. So pretend I didn't say it.]

The "eye" find is great, but the processing is horribly heavy handed. Way too much unsubtle vignetting (it's not like we can't notice the "eye") and the added orange is like guilding a lily. It is not as though the orange painting has even been done carefully, just added with a squirt of color. If the paint, by some chance, was actually there on the trunk, then a black and white rendition would have improved it in my opinion.

Burning, rusty nail
stares out from a rough-hewn plank
ends charred by vignette

Very fine observation, but technically capable of a better result; the image is not natural enough, fuzzy (maybe due to the scanning or download?), and not at all requiring vignetting.
Happily, the author has lots of possibilities to redo this image and make it something (if initial resolution and other camera produced information permits) that can be turned into a large image that would be interesting. But subtlety is more valuable here than the present exaggeration.

I'd like to see this photo as part of a series of organic subjects made intentionally to look artificial. There's a sense of anthropomorphism here, especially interesting considering the organic nature of the subject. Flattening it the way this processing does, highlighting the photographic artifice through exaggeration and forced vignette, if repeated using different sorts of subject matter processed in a variety of thoughtful and insightful artificial ways, could be very effective. The series I propose would benefit from visually suggesting the aesthetic and conceptual value of pairing a natural subject with an unnatural take on it.

Attributing human appearance to the natural object may be interesting and that may be what Rod Hill intended. In such explorations there are probably equally if not more adaptable subjects such as the overall forms of natural matter, such as curiously formed trees, rocks and even vegetable forms, such as the pepper once anthropomorphised by the elder Weston. Craggy wood surfaces are but a portion of that subject matter, and I feel as kind of déjà vu in most cases.

Arthur, I wasn't trying to second-guess what Rod intended. I was offering how what's presented here, if expanded and thought through, could make an interesting project/series where a deliberately artificial processing could be used on natural subjects in a conceptual and aesthetic way.

I'm not sure how déjà vu would fit into that.

Arthur, just to further clarify. Your use of Weston's pepper doesn't really fit into what I was proposing, since I think his pepper is processed in a very natural and elegant way. I was talking about natural subjects being intentionally processed UNnaturally and obviously artificially to form a coherent and thoughtful series. Though I noted that Rod's particular subject had interesting anthropomorphic tendencies, I was not suggesting that all the potential subjects of a proposed series have such tendencies. Like I said, a project might use a VARIETY of natural subjects.

Understood, Fred.

Intentional processing to render a subject unnatural or of unusual or not often seen appearance is of course a great photographic pursuit. It can also be done of course without a heavy hand on the PS sliders, more by an unusual way to approach or render a subject, such as by using light, angle, atmosphere, interaction with other matter, and so on. Elsewhere, I have little patience with anyone who says that they have done everything there is to do in photography (as stated by some former camera club associates, amongst others). Nonsense. They likely have only come to confront another limit, which is that of their own imagination.

A creature lurking in and amongst the wood . . . fascinating concept.