Alnwick Castle III

Thanks for dropping by.

Very nice, I love the contrast of the B&W sky against the green field. Great shot

Cheers

7 7

The scenery is nice, but the clouds are too consistent form the top of the image to the horizon. Too distracting.

Amazing sky!, composition could be stronger but still a great photo welldone.

Great photo..well done

Excelente luz, color y un bello encuadre, perfecta composicion, saludos cordiales Michael.

Nice composition and color. Congrats.

have you black and whited the sky?

It's a very nice photo but it seems strange that the sky have white clouds on te grey clouds it's not clear.

I think that it's a 7/7 kind of photo but the sky, who fits perfectly on the image, is not, as I said before that clear.

With all due rispect,

Giovanni Nug

Thanks all for your comments. Regarding the sky, for good or bad it features in many of my photos and is added in photoshop. It is meant to be surreal and is done purposely. Some like it, some don't and some are undecided, that's why I have to be fair and have posted this under 'digital alterations'. English weather can get weird at times though.

Incredible... 7/7

I think you've succeeded in making this image a bit surrealistic.I like this kind of images a lot.Well done!

Greetings,Jim

Nice work, almost real!

I like it.

"It is meant to be surreal"

 

When you invoke the "surreal" (as it is famously easy to do in Photoshop) you change the rules with which we decode the reality you present. You are in effect suggesting that this lanscape, left to its own devices, could not/did not convey to you, the viewer and recorder, the message that you wanted to impart. So you changed it. What is implied - and absolutely so - is that you have changed the metaphoric balance of the image for a reason == to bring us to realizations/perceptions we would not otherwise have reached. This is a bold act. When you do this you take on an almost god-like power to suggest to us that we are to be led by the hand to a new and different appreciation of the world that we would otherwise have been blind to. The suggestion is not trivial. We all depend on our senses to provide us with a balanced view of our world so that we know what it is and who we are in it. Altering this is subversive, revolutionary -- radical in an important way.

 

The danger of course is that people who change things in this wayvery often do so quite simply because they can - without any sense of the weight of the metaphor they have altered. It is not enough to say that one has altered an image simply "to be surreal" because that is superficial and arbitrary and finally, because there is in fact no answer to the riddle that has been posed, boring. Imagine a child posing you a complex riddle that takes some time to express and when you finally give up trying to guess its meaning and ask what the answer is, there is not and never was one. Perhaps you are amused for a moment but if the child in question begins again to attempt to hold you attention with another such conundrum it would be surprising if your patience endured for very long...

 

You are a photographic artist so of course you are free to play and experiment to the same extent that all artists always have been. I would be the last person to discourage you to do so. But I do not know why the sky is black and white in this image and "just because I can" is not near enough for me. If you wish to make me or the world at large care about your work in the profound way that I hope is your ambition then its language must be persistent and there must be a fullfilling errand in its apprehension.

 

When the surreal school of painting came to the fore from 1910 onward for a bit (I'm a little rusty on the dates but they're not that important) it had thousands of adherents. There are now only a very small handful left holding any lasting place in the regard of the fine art world. Perhaps the greatest of these is Magritte. Why? Because there was an aswer to all his riddles - in Karl Jung's work in fact. The riddle of his painting of a pipe entitled "This is Not a Pipe" has an answer. It is a phallic symbol.

 

Your pictures is immensely well crafted and visually arresting -- you have without question an excellent technical grasp of the medium. What I would hope would be next is vertical movement in the medium as opposed to horizontal. By this I mean making more pictures like this one will not advance you -- that would be horizontal movement. What is left is to improve the "why" behind the technique. That is the one course that would move you up.

 

Forgive me for my lack of reluctance ion voiceing my many opinions. I am embarked on an almost certainly quixotic endeavor to attempt to speak of art in a landscape where most all of the vocabulary is mechanical. Silly of me.

 

jock sturges

So, Jock ... if Mr. Haydon says of his image, "Ok, mine is a phallic symbol, too" ... then the game's over? Granted, his symbols could use the service of an enlarger. :-)

 

Nice comments, however much they are victims of the limitations of words (and time) ... more of this, and maybe I'll start reading critiques again. Thank you both.

The pipe ='s phallic symbol transaction was specific to one painting but symptomatic of the larger metaphor underpinning all of Magritte's work -- the materialization of Jung's symbolic analysis of the human experience in the actuality of paint. So, no he wouldn't be done in declaring that the picture's metaphoric errand was one specific thing unless whatever that was was an integrated part of a larger, cohesive endeavor. I put no specific qualifier on the word endeavor there because I see no limit to the number of angles one can take into this thing. What is manifest does not have to come from any given corner of human thought. But thought there must be. Or else we are just being posed answerless riddles.

 

I do agree that words are limited -- and the more so by the time I have to write them -- hardly any. This leaves me feeling imprecise and fairly dumb as often as not but one does the best one can.

 

jock

Thanks for your comments Jock, Douglas and all. To answer at least one of your questions Jock, it may be found in the 'Northumberland' folder itself. I have given this area of Northern England a darker than normal treatment, a medievil look if you will...it is just the way I saw Northumbria at the time. It is not meant to be sinister or subversive, but a struggle through time. It is still and always will be 'the romantic north'. If I could have painted this picture it would probably have turned out very much the same. Tools like photoshop are there just to help us create, and dabble yes. Thanks again Gentlemen, I DO value your input.

Well, I'm gonna have to sleep on all this ... and see what dreams may come. And if the riddle is solved ... and a coherent metaphor gently and surreally floats up into my conscious mind ... illuminating a cohesive endeavor ... then I'll know that I've witnessed art. But who's art would it then be?

The artist or photographer who's picture you see.! But maybe the artist or photographer should also give praise to God and the person who discovered the canvas, the brush, oil paints, the digital camera and of course the medium of film. It's all there just so we can create.

 

This is very nicely done, but the foreground is too dominant and too concrete for me to have any particular sense of the surreal. If the castle and foreground were reworked, on the other hand, then I think that it might be possible to get the emotional reaction that you are seeking eo evoke in the viewer. Otherwise, we will notice the sky, but its lack of color will have no particular impact on us at the level of true aesthetic appreciation.

 

That said, I think that the original shot would probably stand on its own as a fine photo, and as presented it is still worth looking at.

 

--Lannie

It did occur to me a bit later that a shopped-in sky of a squall line approaching (in black and white) would have more dramatic impact. I can see a lot of possibilities with this if you are not averse to Photoshop work.

 

Given all that, I would still like to see the original to see why you changed it. It does not appear that you merely grey-scaled the sky, but that you replaced it.

 

--Lannie