Chattahoochee Kayaker

not sure why that didnt attach right...

try http://www.shoal.net.au/~wkturnbull/reflections.jpg

The trails left by particles moving in the water suggest a long exposure, but the kayaker is sharp. Hmmmm...

What do I see? Colors with a sudden impact.The red and blue certainly do the trick here. An unusual crop...thats it.

It reminds me a lot at the older images, where you have an unintersting sky and then you use all kinds of sunset filters to make it look interesting. I have to agree to the above comment. If Adam said so (did he?).. i believe him that it is along time exposure.Its true though that there are a whole range of characteristics missing for that type of image. Somehow the light on the boat looks like dimmed daylight. ... I dont mind and it does not influence my feelings about the image much.

I miss an atmosphere in the whole scenery, the first impact of the colors and the crop is quickly lost, looking longer at it, the saturated colors even work against the whole content of the image. Somehow i wished to see a bit more in the blacks of the forest and even the red in front of me...there is not much of a story. Its an intersting image for the graphics and the colors, but it still fails to capture me behond the first seconds.

My feelings seem to agree with Felix's to a point. I think it's a very attractive photo, very colorful, but I don't have any other reactions to it. I like the sequence; from the purple horizon to the blue water, and the orange foreground; but I want to see more of the story, especially because the vertical crop is leading my eye downward. Just for fun, I'd love to see a version with a hint of the lights on the bridge in the very foreground. That might resolve it for me. Whether the colors are real or not, manipulated or not, it looks unreal to me, so I need some justification of that.

 

Still thinking...

Good shot. I like it. But the kayaker wasn't there at the time of the shot. The kayak is not blurred even though the water clearly shows that it is a long time exposure. The front of the waves is dark and doesn't reflect the red light coming from under the bridge.

Reality shot? No. Art? yes. Good work!

Well I don't understand all the techie stuff you guys are discussing, but I think this is beautiful - it looks as though he's travelling through the dawn, from darkness into light. (Very spiritual!)

I like the colours in this and the 'looming' object in the foreground... but that kayak - and more importantly the wake of ripples coming from it - look just grafted on using a Photoshop layer burn or suchlike. It looks totally unreal to me, and not in an eerie or surreal way.

I like digital manipulation, and use it myself, but to create an effect that either enhances reality, or creates some unreality that makes us think again about what is real and what isn't. Here, it seems to be purely a painting-by-numbers way of composing the picture. It's striking for an instant, but only an instant... in my view. But then I am notoriously hard to please and can see why many others love this picture! Congrats on the PoW.

A compelete feeling of peace and serenity comes across from this. Plus the fact it is so technically well done. Good POW choice

i have analysed this picture for a while..it is quite obviously a result of some serious work in PS..This is what i believe has been done to the picture...bottom and top are two seperate photos stitched together and blended..the boat has been cropped from a seperate source and the water design has been either drawn in (some photo software has this ability) or it was cropped along with the boat....colour saturation in the water ripples was then modified to match the upper picture and i suspect a lot of softening and smudging was carried out where the boat and the two original pictures all meet

 

if i am wrong or if anyone else has any other opinions on what was done i would like to hear as it is certainly a very interesting choice this week...i like the picture for its aesthetic value and for the obvious effort that was put into it

I find a great eerie quality to this photo. To me, it is obviously fabricated, but so are many things. However, I would like to see the orginal photos that went into making this one. That way, I can admire both the photographers vision and Photoshop work!

 

Chris

Its a cool image and is very relaxing to look at....but my opnion is this...I think any company that is paying for an image excluding legal issues...will not care what has to be done...just deliver the goods. I think we might soon see two types of people survive in this market...photographers...and image makers.

I agree with the thoughts that the kayak should show some blur if this shot

was a single exposure. Personally, I would crop out the bottom 3rd, leaving

just a hint of the red-ish water.

Looks to me that cayaker is resting on the shallows, thus stationary. The river's current is causing the ripples. Pretty simple, really. Straight shot, little manipulation. However, if Adam lives in/near Atlanta, he should be able to better spell the river's name! Great shot.

Although I like the scene very much, the heavy saturation is not to my liking. I am also puzzled by the lighting near the bottom of the picture, which would seem to come from some other source besides the sky.

 

I tried reducing saturation first by ten percent, then twenty, and so on, until I had reduced it a full forty percent in the attached version. It still does not seem quite right.

 

Congratulations on having your shot selected as Photo of the Week. It is overall a good shot, but my own personal tastes run toward more of a natural treatment.

If you read carefully photographer mentions, the light at the bottom of the shot is due to streetlight from some bridge or something...

A streetlight? That is all the more reason to ask for a more natural treatment

You only get the flattening of the water effect when the exposure is quite long. I believe you can still get ripples with a longish exposure. But to me this has to be manipulated as the kayak & kayaker are far too sharp for any exposure longer than half a second.

I have to agree with Chris about seeing the originals, I would love to see if I would think the same way... or have similar vision.

It's a neat shot-manipulated or otherwise. I'd prefer it if were not, but like others, I am

also not sure.

I think it's a striking, amusing, science-fictionish photo. I like it.

 

To ask for it to be "naturalistic" when it's a night shot is goofy: Color photos of night scenes don't do "naturalistic." They do mundane conventions of what we expect or they do new things, like this one. As for the color at the bottom, who knows the street light's color balance or its affect on the particular camera (film?).

Pity the swirl at the bottom. In color and content it reminds me of vomit being sucked down the commode after losing a bout with bulimia. And yes, the correct spelling is Chattahoochee.

Looks like the underwater element was the intended subject, but the result wasn't as interesting as was hoped for. Instead of tossing it and maybe rethinking the composition and going back for another attempt at a coherent capture, the saturation was boosted and the kayak was added as an additional area of interest. We've seen how often this works for viewers who like the initial kick of the colors and who take the composition at face value. Heck, once they see it's implausible as a photograph, it becomes instant art, rather than a patch job.

Great shot. Very nice colors and perspective. Congratulations. 7/7

I think it's a pleasing image, but the compositing of the kayaker isn't done all that well. There are some minor scale and perspective issues that make it look unnatural, but the lighting on the kayak totally blows the illusion. You can see a pretty strong shadow projected to the front and right of the kayaker, but alas, there's no source of light in the other direction. Sure enough, I checked out Adam's web site and it's called photoillustrate.com. Very promising work for a student and I see's he's (deservedly) getting work already.

Great sense of INVOLVING & MOVEMENT. This photo is a pattern to imitate. 7/7