Matera2

Another image from the old city Matera in Italy. Ratings and comments

are appreciated

A masterpiece, ciao Giangiorgio

Thank you Giangiorgio

Nice work!

 

Beautiful work. Love it.

Sergio and Tony, thank you so much.

Excellent composition and scene.

Thank you Chris.

Matera is always worth! Great photo!

 

This photo looks like one of those watercolor artworks that you see for sale at a tourist store. I'm afraid I find its lack of realism unsatisfactory in this case. Shadows are boosted too much and the whole color palette to me is too sentimental and prettified. Where is the realism that would make this shot really shows us what Matera is like? I assume this is a case of the dreaded HDR being overused. This is just not to my taste, and millions may disagree. The composition is satisfactory but the overall presentation is really not my thing.

I'd like to see the image before Eystein processed it. It seems to me that whatever processing was involved led to an overabundance of a blue cast on the walls and roofs. The two other images in the Matera series do not have the same appearance.

To me, pretty much what Robin said. There is nothing wrong trying to maximise dynamic range (be it through HDR, be it some other technique), but overdoing it leads really nowhere for me. This image, as presented, on a whole lacks contrast and punch, which it probably originally had, as it got sacrificed to extending the dynamic range. It now looks bland, candy-coloured and does little to inform me whether Matera might be worth the visit.

If it were a horizontal instead of vertical sliced photo of a historic village, it would be more pleasing to the eye, and more generous in its intention. As a vertical, my eye tends to the village sited on its interesting hill with its historic buildings as a backdrop to the foreground And that is a tepid group of plants in a pot. I mean not brilliant sunflowers or anything to grab one's attention. Not a line of clotheslines with bright toggery even.. This I kind of think it is a case where the use of the vertical frame was not the most propitious use of the format. So the focus is on the subject of lesser interest in terms of space and placement. There are other items as noted. So I start with what is the focus in de constructing this photo and got sort of lost at the outset.

Was this at press of the Posterize button in PhotoShop? The before version might have some merit.

The first thing to strike me, even before the over the top HDR, is the focus being set to the buildings in the far back of the scene. This seems an odd choice with such a large portion of the foreground occupying the frame. There are lots of ways to make an image work with a soft foreground however in this image it serves no purpose and feels like an oversight rather than an artistic choice. In the larger version the full extent of how far wrong the processing has gone on the foreground really jumps out. For that much posterization and noise to occur I'm guessing that the foreground was grossly underexposed and dragged kicking and screaming out of the darkness. If the drab and out of focus flowers were cropped out, then you would have something closer to the typical hallucinatory postcard pic, which I assume was the goal here.

I am surprised that nobody commented on the sky - looks pasted in! And I bet it is pasted in! The sky is the only aspect of the photo that is not garishly overprocessed. This really was the photo of the week? Must be a joke!

When an image is so obviously manipulated I find myself looking for the story the artist is trying to tell, or the emotion to be communicated. I have been unable to find either the story or the emotion, so I am lost as to the artistic intent. I'll also echo the confusion wrought by the out-of-focus foreground.