paul hays

Nicely abstract image- but it seems like the lower right corner could be burned in slightly. On my monitor the corner fades to the photo.net background..

 

Is the vignetting of the image purposeful? If so: maybe a bit less- I think the shallow depth of field is enough to focus one's attention on the couple.

I've been experimenting with infrared film lately, and am starting

to get a feel for it ( a rather expensive learning curve). Any

critique of the image is very welcome.

There's always something about desaturated color images that strike me as slightly off, perhaps because the "desaturation" function of Photoshop doesn't accurately reproduce the tonal range of any black and white film I'm aquainted with. Did you use the "image/adjust/desaturate" route? I find that the "image/adjust/channelmixer + monochrome" technique provides a more realistic B&W image, the sliders allowing helpful fine tuning of the desaturation process. Thanks for sharing your work,

this was a lousy scan. In the original print, the wall visible on the left shows detail to nearly the center of the image. My scanner has always given me problems with blacks, producing excess noise that has to be reduced through darkening the entire image. ( I *can't* recommend the Agfa Snapscan 1212)

This was taken inside the old railround roundhouse on the former site of the Southern Pacific Bayshore Railyards. Located just south of San Francisco, these once extensive yards are now empty and largely cleared out. This roundhouse was one of few remaining signs that a busy railsystem existed. Unfortunately, the building was gutted in a fire in the fall of 2001...

some photos get rated and some don't- I imagine this somehow ended up in the "rate yesterdays uploaded photo" queue.

 

I had just built the camera a few minutes previous to making the exposure, at the World Pinhole Photography Day exhibit at the Marin Headland Istitute for the Arts open house. Obviously the exposure needed a little fine tuning- the pillar at the center of the photo is actually the base of a turning radar antenna, blurred from the 60 second exposure...

but perfect focus (or even any focus) is not all it's cracked up to

be...

Unfortunately, this roll was underdeveloped at the lab; I lost quite a bit of detail in the charred portion of the in-focus tree. This was my best effort at salvaging the shot. If I printed the tree/sand any lighter, I'd lose the blacks.

There's a version of this shot, with a DoF that includes more of the trees, that I've yet to print- from the contact sheet it seemed less visually interesting, but who knows?

More moody/atmospheric? I'd burn in the lower corners of the frame, as well as areas above the door- trying to get the same values as around the window and the wall slanting away from it... Regardless, nice photo- The smear of clouds works well

Would it have been possible to have taken this from a higher vantage point? To my eye, the strongest part of this photo is the path, both it's wandering course and as a separation of the flower beds. I think the image would have been more visually striking if the pathway was bolder..

Where is this in Portland?

This shot is quite fun, but maybe the skin tone is a bit grey? Also, when viewed in the "medium" size, it appears that there has been quite a bit of touch-up done digitaly. That kind of thing takes a pretty light hand, or it ends up detracting from the portrait.

I scoured the beach here for discarded and burned christmas

trees to assemble this line of trees... Its a yearly ritual in SF to

haul the trees down to the beach and have huge bonfires, but a

high tide and poor timing reduced my available subject matter.

This pile of waste earth was only 8-10 ft tall- A wide angle

lense and stopped down aperature was used to obscure size.

Vignetting? Oops. But I kind of like it.