Angels

Love this: the light, the perspective, the color. I'm a sucker for decay photos anyway. This makes you wonder...at some time, someone obviously cared enough to make decorative efforts. The house is now empty, yet the decorative attempts remain as a clue of a different past.

Nice colors and angles. I like how you processed this. Something about what I see out the back window doesn't quite fit though for me but it's definitely a great shot.

I really like t his image Chuck. Such a rundown building, but this room is home to someone. The angels although decorative seem to give one room to 'wonder' and think about all who have come and gone from this place.

Nice work...love the colours.

Warm regards, Gail

Well done Chuck !

The thumbnail drew me in immediately--I love the colors, concept, and 3-D qualities of this one!  It has a sort of creepy fairy-tale feeling that is quite enjoyable.  The quirky colors and skewed angles fit the concept very well, and I find myself making up interesting stories to go along with the scene. 

I'm a bit distracted, though, by the fairly obvious cloning and flipping (with a bit of stretching/warping) going on at the base of the doorway frame and the nearby floor; the resulting effect is perhaps appropriately surreal but I think it might work better if some extra care had been taken to make the work less obvious.  Once I noticed all of the little cloned/flipped details in the lower portion of the image, I couldn't enjoy the rest of it.  :-(    (While I'm on that topic, the cherubs are even more disconcerting; they look completely pasted in and out of place, just floating in mid-air, with one obviously cloned and flipped from the other.  I know they are central to the idea of this image, given your choice of title, but my two cents--one cent?--is that the image might work better without them at all.) 

I hate to sound so negative.  I absolutely love the middle of the photo, with that wonderful pink light and view out the window.  If the balance of the image weren't so good, I wouldn't even bother to comment about the cloning distractions.  The quality of the rest of the image is good enough that I think it would be well worth the effort to clean things up a bit.  And I admit I may be in the minority when it comes to noticing and being bothered by such things.  (Note that it is *not* the manipulation I object to at all!  It is merely the lack of time and effort taken to make sure the results aren't so obvious (and therefore unnecessarily distracting).  As an analogy, I love immersing myself in the fantasy of a good motion picture, but I don't want to see evidence of the camera crew or lighting assistant in the corner of the frame, LOL.) 

BTW, I found this image when I linked to your portfolio from your lovely B&W photo, "Variety of Purposes."  I will try to comment on that one later.  Just glancing at your portfolio, I can tell you have some very accomplished images, and I'll definitely take the time to go through your work at a more leisurely pace when I get the opportunity! 

I appreciate all of you taking the time to comment.

Elizabeth, Special thanks to you. It is a rare thing to have someone make as long and complex comments as you and I appreciate that you did. You're right about everything, but the door trim was very out of focus at the bottom right and although it's not hard to see it's copied from the left side I thought it was a reasonable compromise. The angel hangs on the wall outside my bedroom. I added it/them because I felt that the image needed something and that came to mind. If I were planning on trying to sell this I might clean up those flaws, but my main outlet for my work is posting here on Photo.net and the exposure you get here is very transitory,  basically 24 hours, so I usually don't put a lot of time into my processing, maybe an hour or so.

I'm very glad for the exchange of ideas on this image.  One never knows how a critique (no matter how honest or well-intentioned) is going to be received on the internet, and I greatly appreciate your response.   I understand exactly what you are saying about an image serving as a personal outlet (vs. an image created expressly for outside audience, i.e., for sale).   It's too bad that the exposure of images here is so transitory, as you say.  Thanks again for the conversation about this one.