Holding a helicopter

This is a great shot. You are probably the best

photojournalist right now. :-)

 

Thanks for sharing your work.

Tuan

This is excellent and imaginative photojournalism. It's easy to fall into simply making a representation of what you are documenting without instilling any artistic touch, and I really admire how well you avoid that. Your photographs are great documents, and works of art as well.

There's been a lot of great work showing up here lately, but yours stands out, not just for the quality of the work, but for the few minutes it takes to annotate. I'm playing at considering myself a photographer, and seeing your notes on how your shots were composed or arranged or lit gives me ideas of how to work and expand. Thanks for your contributions!!!

Very fine use of the 24mm; and that helicopter must have been pretty darned *close*!

 

Now I know what kind of photography I'm looking for. Great job! Why don't you share more of you photos?

Very good composition

My only 10-10 rating so far!

The depth of focus is extreme which would imply a small aperture, hence a longer exposure, but there is hardly any motion at all. I guess it was a very fast film? I dont know what you did but it looks great!

this is an amazing photgraph! I love it!

what am i supposed to say about it? its just not a shot or a real life view that anyone would ever see or think about. ...excellent.

7&6

Fantastic shot. Did he get "Jolted" when he grabbed the hook? I did lot's of heli-rescue work and we always grounded the hook before grabbing it. Keep up the great workl

I think black and white is what helps make this photo because the lines become silhouettes...the man looks so incredibly powerful from the angle he's photographed at, like *he* is controlling the copter, and not vice-versa.

 

No face is needed. :-) You get more sense of his power from not seeing his face.

 

He looks almost like a modern-day Atlas.

Great shot! The angle puts the viewer into the action and gives a sense of "reality" as well since all elements pertinent to the task being photographed are within the frame (man, line, helicopter...).

 

I also think that the B&W makes it a stronger picture than color would have. In that colors in this case are not the focus, the action is.

 

Excellent PJ work!

I remember seeing this awhile back and the image has stayed with me - it's pretty damn good. I wish the walkie-talkie were not so front & center, though its presence is important to tell the story. A powerful image in any event.

Great composition. Like the contrast between him and the helicopter. The chopper becomes the focal point for me.

Kudos to elves for choice of this work by one of my favourite cameramen on photo.net. Everything is there that needs to be there, and nothing is extraneous or distracting. In particular response to the questions posed; B&W is appropriate because colour "may" have been distracting (although I would also like to see a colour version), and the silhouette of the beard provides the human connection that makes the rest of the face unnecessary. The strong composition combined with the unique point of view make it a compelling photo. The photographer's talent in putting it all together is what makes him a PROfessional.

Good work Dan... Good to see your work on PN again.

What a picture and a portfolio!!! Some pics make me think to Marc Riboud's shots.

 

Congratulations.

As already mentioned, you have excellent industrial documentation and photo-journalist images on top of the usual photographs. This image certainly gets a 7 for originality but aesthetically I think there is room for improvement, but that is mostly dictated by weather conditions. A blue sky with some clouds, and some good colours in the equipment and the gloves would make for a more graphically interesting colour image. With conditions as they were this had to be black and white. Slightly wider at 20mm would have given us more impression of distance to the helicopter and more of the mans torso and perhaps his arms would not have been quite so constrained. Oddly, I think the face is not important but the brim of a hardhat might help.

There is nothing I would change in this splendid image, except I would probably have a shaved subject over a bearded one. We don't really need to see the face, but if we saw the chin it would just be perfect. A bearded chin, from this angle, is rather confusing, and I guess that's the reason why this was brought up in the discussion guidelines.

I really appreciate the creativity and composition in this photograph. Nice balance of sky (upper right)/and worker (lower left). Again, taking what can potentially be a ho-hum photo into something really dynamic is quite a skill!

 

No, no need to see the face (once I noticed the beard).

I might have wished for something other than a beard to represent his head, and I think the walkie talkie is a little distracting, and a bit of separation between the hand and the hook would be nice. . . . . but somehow none of this matters to me as much as I would expect it to because what grabs me instead is the ambiguity that someone else mentioned about who's in control of whom. Great shot.

Beard and walkie talkie considerations aside, I think this is an excellent photograph that works very well in black and white because of it's composition. Wide angle perspective, the lines and the mans arms all draw you in towards the helicopter. Great photo.

Like Laura N., I would say that the approach taken yield this image creates an interesting "control" ambiguity. When I saw the thumbnail my first thought was that this was a shot of someone launching one of those rip-cord powered toy whirlybirds. Although I was mistaken, the same dynamics are at work. Men and their toys.