Park Benches

Playing around with an image from 2014. I used a layer of blur to

make the background softer.

Don't see many urban shots from you, Steve. Good idea to take a picture of these benches from just this angle, creating a whole different sculptural tree form. Too bad the shadow on the right is just slightly cut off; just a tad more space would give a more balanced picture. The background blur has been successfully incorporated into the picture since I never noticed it until I read your remarks.

Thanks for the comments Jack.  Here's the original. I lost some of the right edge when I straightened the photo!

Love the graphical design.

I like the energy here. It's kind of an abstraction of an urban scene, graphic yet has a reality that seems very familiar. Shadows are great. The cutting off of the right side doesn't bother me. Actually, I kind of like it when compared to the original which doesn't cut off the shadow. The reason being that it's such a centered, symmetrical composition that some tension produced by the nicking of that shadow seems to add some dimension to me. I do like the overall feel of the blurred background. I'd have a question about that last table, though. If the ground under it were blurred, wouldn't it also be blurred? Not that it has to be, but it might make more photographic sense that way. And, the way it is, it does seem a little imperfectly executed. There's an area around the edges of the table which got some of the blur and that might be worth cleaning up a bit. I do kind of like the lone guy walking on the path in the original, and the way he kind of relates and doesn't relate to the tables. But, since I prefer the overall photo with the blur, I guess I'll just have to miss him! Anyway, all nitpicking aside, I really like your bold, graphic approach to this. You went for it, straight up the middle, and it paid off.

Thanks for the critique, Fred.  I was a bit sloppy with the blur effect, as you noticed, and I would perfect it more if I were to make a framed print!  My goal was to make it look like I had used a more open f stop which would have blurred more of the background.  Actually, I could go back to this spot and do it again too.

Nice image composition and choice of post-processing. Bold and graphic. I struggle with the blurred layer approach too. No matter how well it seems you've selected the subject for masking it still takes additional work to get absolutely perfect. I'd rather do this in the darkroom. Starting to use more film and now I am considering renting darkroom space as I sold all my darkroom equipment off about a year ago due to lack of use. One person just commented to me on Model Society that he felt he has yet to produce any digital black and white that is superior or even equal in quality to anything he produced in the darkroom. After considering that, I had to agree.

Thanks for the comment Philip. I maybe could have just used a f 1.4 lens or something. Interesting you are preferring film for black and white. I look at the images I did on film, and even scanning the negs they have a quality that you don't get in digital. I have no time for the darkroom work any more, unfortunately. I am doing mostly color these days anyway, which I almost never did in my darkroom days doing black and white.