vadim_makarov

I don't find this photo interesting.

Very good, but I've one problem: I cannot figure how big the thing is. Is the window several floors high? One floor? Half a floor? There is nothing to compare the size to.

This is dune porn.
Excellently done.

I think the image could be used on a postcard (possibly with cropped top and bottom as others have suggested).

 

What was the shutter speed, aperture and ISO setting?

 

Is this just my new monitor, or it looks oversharpened to others too? It's as if you have sharpened it twice: look at the double contours of buildings against the sky.

I find the watermark to be too obtrusive to enjoy the image.

This has been my desktop background for the past three months. I wish you posted a higher-resolution version on your website, though, for that purpose.

So, did the hyena catch her dinner?

Aargh! This one would benefit immensely from cropping, on all four sides. The amount of cropping on each side may vary (there are several possible compositions), but the pucture is just begging for a tighter composition. Right now there are too many things visible in it besides the main focus.

Ive asked this before in another image and did not get an answer. With little hope, let me repeat it. Has any of you ever wondered how have these rock patterns and shapes came into existence?

How did the wavy pattern form? Is this due to glacial abrasion, or what?

Dammit. What has happened to his genitalia?

May I voice a mild complaint that I would like to see this photo uploaded in a larger size. It really deserves looking at details.

Id like to offer a suggestion to answer the question about color. Judging from the f-stop/ISO/exposure data for this image, this is a relatively bright aurora, so it would probably be seen as green by the eye, close to its photographic depiction. However, weaker (less bright) auroras are not percepted by the eye as having a strong color or any color at all, because color receptors (cones) in the eye are not sensitive to weak light, only monochrome receptors (rods) are. This is called a scotopic, or night, vision: everything is be perceived as monochrome, or with pale colors. Also, rods are more sensitive in the green and partially sensitive in the blue part of the spectrum. So, red colors look much darker than other colors in near darkness. Color film does not mimic scotopic vision. It records everything in full color even at very long exposures and/or high ISO.

Digital cameras could in principle mimic scotopic vision, but I am yet to hear of such a recording mode. It could be mimicked (after some research) with manual processing in Photoshop if the exposure data is recorded. The result probably wont be pretty, if accurate :).

It is a little trick photographers practice: shoot at low light, show fantastic colors the eye never sees.

Full fathom five...

Crop off the unneeded, mundane things. Leave these two pairs alone with the miracle.

(The rule of thirds is not for all cases. Here a symmetric composition works better, I think.)

How big is the damn thing? Is it of a hoofprint size (perhaps not, youd have a problem with the DOF), a puddle, a pond, or a small mountain lake?

After a deliberation, I conclude that the round boulders in the upper left corner set the size in the pond range. If you cropped them out, the scale would be impossible to guess (at the image resolution you posted on photo.net, at least).

Otherwise, very interesting volcanic, glowing colors.

I thought what an excellent studio shot, with a single light positioned just properly to lit sharply just what needs to and his face by scattered light. Then I read your description. The stage lighting guy must be doing something right. This image can be used for artist's publicity right away, especially if he doesn't have many good images of himself playing. Send it to him, you might get a request for licensing (or a request for permission to use for free, which would be up to you to allow or deny :). Double acknowledgements to you if you have got it in a good resolution (no blur on a larger image), but it is usable as it is already.

It is a very good shot.

There should be a balance between the courtyard and the vista beyond it. It's a difficult decision, but in your original shoot I've found myself hard pressed to look beyond the courtyard. The vista on this shot should be relatively bigger to invite the viewer have a close look at it. I've tried to crop the image in the same aspect ratio without losing the context of the courtyard while making the opening relatively bigger (and also moving the opening and the covered well off-center, which I think also makes for a more interesting composition; it's actually one of the standard composition guidelines to have the objects of interest off-center and in the "golden third" points).

 

(I hope you've had time before the lighting disappeared to take at least one different crop from the one you've uploaded here.)

On the technical side, it is oversharpened. If you use Photoshop, try to reduce the Radius in Unsharp Mask to 0.5

 

Also, I have a trouble figuring the scale of the image (which is not necessarily a drawback). It makes me think, how big is this thing? Is it a hill, a cliff, or just a rock? I'd guess it's the latter, but how high?

I'm sorry for disappointing you, but the number of views you were impressed with is not the number of views of this page. It counts how many times the image was served, in all sizes including thumbnail. Therefore, this number for a POW is just about how many times the photo.net home page was requested on a given week.

I don't know why the elves decided not to show the true, much smaller, number of views, or at least state somewhere what the figure represents. Yeah, larger numbers look better.

By the way, the numbers for POWs show that photo.net popularity is declining, for some reason.

Sorry, it doesn't make it for me.

 

I'll try to look for explanations why this image doesn't invoke any reaction in me. As somebody already mentioned, there really is no main object. Foam from the boat is burned out (and looks a bit yellowish. I'd tweak color balance a bit). Sky is dull. There is nothing interesting on the coast. Light looks flat. Yes, there is a geometric composition of the rope/wake, and for that I give it 5 in originality. Yes, the color is kind of vivid, but doesn't convey me anything... 4 in aesthetics. Then, I might be not a big fan of this type of photography/object.

 

I like how this image tells the story.

You scroll it on the screen from left to right. By the time you've scrolled it to the middle, you have a sense of what a great place this is (a sense of being taken there, in fact, because the image is quite big and well-detailed). Then, what a surprise, Alex appears, and you can guess what goes next... Philip with a computer and a set for ball game finishes the story by telling us what's being done there.

This image is worth a lot of words.

Pawel, Philip already has a PhD and photo.net is not in the MIT network now (not unless MIT co-locates at Exodus).

I feel an urge to shift a bit to the left and back up somewhat, then see if it makes composition tighter. I feel there is a bit too much free and uninteresting space (left rock on the bacground, too much of water surface). Nice shot. No thanks, I don't have space on my office walls.

 

I'd definitely crop the white top and most of the black bottom. They distract a lot. With these cropped, the image becomes simple and includes nothing that doesn't belong to it... very good.