Pasar Ngasem (Bird Market)

A picture from times before SARS and bird flu, taken at

the bird market of Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia.

 

What about the cropping? And the composition?

can't see what kind of bird that is...

Hi Salvatore, I know, you're right, I should always explain my low ratings, though sometimes, when I have nothing to do, I just pass one picture after another and rate.

So, to me this picture, despite being technically corect (good exposure, nice warm colors and good texture), does not work. The main reason is that you cannnot see the birds, so it has no journalistic value. Also, the composition is not particularly artistic, so it does not reach the main objective a picture should reach: communicate either a fact (journalistic value) or a feeling (artistic value).

As for my TV pics, I know they haave no phoographic value, but I wanted to see what people thought about them. Most, like you, do not appreciate, but I'm also getting some interesting inputs.

Ciao,

marco

Fair enough, Marco, it was not the numeric rating which annoyed me, rather the absence of any comment. Thanks for passing by again: I am pleased and appreciative of your explanation.

 

Within my limited skills, I wanted to show a pattern of cages, of a warm but dark colour, and some contrasting-and-hence-lighter coloured bird inside... nothing really journalistic, since it is just a bird in a cage, after all, nor artistic, since I do not think I've really any artistic talent, I fare better in the analytic deparment, usually.

 

To complete this photocritique exercise I am eager to be educated in what Ugur Atila disliked.

 

p.s. Eric, I'm also weak in the ornithology department... for me they are "white birds", sorry!

hii. Sorry for my wrong rated. I update now. Best regards

There is a difficult situation here. On the one hand you want to show many cages to get the overall atmosphere of this bird market, but you want to see the birds clearly, too. In this case you have neither. This is perhaps a subject for two separate photos. One using a wide angle depicting the market from further away, with a lot more cages and the people around them, and the other a close up photo of a bird in a cage. The only way to combine both is to use a wide angle (20mm) and get really close to one bird, position it in one corner, and with the rest of the frame capture the other cages and perhaps some people. You would have to have the bird really close to the cage bars for this to work, though.

Johannes, thanks for your insight. I think you are right in that the fact that one does not clearly see "a bird in a cage" detracts from the picture. I often have the same bad feeling about this image, but then I rather ascribe it to the bar of the cage which I unfortunatly had overlapped with the eye of the closest bird. I also agree that having shot closer with a wider angle [i must have had a 28mm at the time, if I remember correctly] might have helped.

 

Cheers,