new -- color & b&w 'Locomotive Cab and the Hand'

Sometimes the surreal is just a click away as in this photo 'The Locomotive Cab and

the Hand' taken in Budapest a while ago with a nod to one-time Hungarian Andre

Kertesz. Your ratings, critiques and observations are invited and most welcome. If

you rate harshly, very critically, or you wish to make a remark, please submit a helpful

and constructive comment; please share your photographic knowledge to help improve

my photography. Thanks! Enjoy! john

Love the hand! Seeing the title, I looked for it. It's so subtle I might've missed it otherwise (but it is a happy surprise when seen).

Amy

Thanks for the kind critique.  

This has been a most perplexing photo; I had chosen to display (and there still is displayed under an earlier folder) this photo in color with the engineer in the window.

A Lucie Award Winner reviewing and curating my work stopped at this one seven or so years ago and said 'do you know what you have?', and obligingly and quite innocently I said 'no', as I really didn't.  

He had in his mind a landmark photo, I am sure, by Andre Kertesz, which I invite you to look for in the work of Kertesz (hint: it's taken on a boat, of the cabin of a boat, probably showing the galley with a hand reaching through a window around a fan blade, if memory serves me correctly, probably in a harbor like the lower Hudson at Manhattan where Kertesz went after chased from Europe as a Jew by the Nazis.

He was a photographer's photographer, and his work varied, from his great 'Chez Mondrian (house of Mondrian', to a woman on a couch, arms and legs akimbo, to a simple skyscraper and a lone, small cloud, among his many greats.  His work is well worth looking at.

The Lucie Award winner, my mentor at the time, pointed this one out from my downloads and said 'this one is a winner', and I thought he mean the version with engineer in the cab and was perplexed, but he meant this one, and I understood the surreal nature of the photo after we discussed it a little.

However, the original was in color with a yellow locomotive and a flesh color hand, and try as I might, the hand in color just couldn't contrast enough with the similar color of the cab to make a proper contrast, plus there was digital noise in the hand from an early model D70 that early software just wouldn't eliminate.  It was a 'great photo' except, and I do mean 'EXCEPT'.

Now, after taking a course n composition from Lynda.com, and also working more with black and white, I decided 'why not try this in B&W' and am also aided by new tools in Photoshop CC which keeps the noise down, especially in a B&W conversion and keeps contrast in control.  The hand, hardly visible to you in B&W, I think would have been entirely passed over by you in color, and that kept me for six years from posting this.  

This is its first post.

Perhaps with a proper color workup and superb photoshopping and a huge gallery size blowup this D70 photo might actually work as a color version to stop gallery traffic in a large blowup (given proper anti-noise treatments).

As it is, I'm delighted so far at its reception; I've been looking at it for a long time; was told it was 'great' and 'gallery worthy' in its color version, but it just wasn't contrasty enough in color to catch the eye.   B&W seems to suit it better.

I'm glad and happy for your comment.

If you see the Kertesz photo I'm referring to, you'll know which one the award winner and I both were referring to and see the similarity and thus why he chose this one also as a winner, I think.

Best to you.

john

John (Crosley)

Beside what I wrote above, and the troubles I had with the color rendering, I downloaded this apparently twice; once with jpegs only, which limited choices in rendering.

Later I realized, but did not know the significance of downloading raw (NEF) versions as well as the jpegs, and also downloaded those, and this is a rendering from a NEF version, for the very first time, and both this and the color version are manifold improved by the rendering (1) from NEF (raw) versions and (2) up to date Adobe software.

At the time taken, there really was no good way to download and process raw (NEF) images, unless one used Nikon's proprietary software, and that was a mess and hard to control -- and almost impossible to learn, even.

Now it's just a breeze, and results are easily rendered by almost anyone with any slight skills.

This photo is a tribute to throwing nothing that has any promise away -- even if it cannot then be rendered well at the time; as time passes software changes and other improvements make some possible throwaway photos salvageable and even potential 'winners'.  Many of my best photos at one time were throwaway candidates that I saved for several years, then reprocessed as Adobe upgraded its software.

There's a lesson in there.  (whether or not you like or love this particular photo).

Best.

john

John (Crosley)

That is a good, lesson, John.

Amy

:-->>

When this first was pointed out to me as a possible prize-winning 'fine art' photo.  However as a color photo I scoffed at first but after a few pointers, I learned a lesson, and as a color photo it was hard to read and show with the yellow of the locomotive, the orange of the hand and the orange/red digital noise of the window all working at cross purposes to defeat the contrast I felt was needed to show well digitally. (Maybe not in a gallery).

Now with Photoshop CC 2015 in color it's pretty good, and after working well with the conversion to 'black and white' choosing my channels carefully, it has turned out far better as a black and white photo than I ever imagined.

Thanks for the welcoming comment.

I'm always delighted to see you snooping around my folders; I have thousands of other photos you haven't seen, not all as good as this and a few that are better -- some queued up for posting, although truth be told, my posting really is ad hoc -- it's whatever suits me at the moment when I scan my vast folders of unposted photos generally (with few exceptions).  I with you were a neighbor and could come over and we could share files together as personal friends, not just cyberfriends.

Thanks for paying me and my photos a visit.  You're always welcome.

john

John (Crosley)