mottershead

Wasn't this a monthly winner recently on Michael Reichmann's The Luminous Landscape web site?

It is important to try to separate your feelings about the subject from what is actually, objectively, in the photo for others to see.

 

As you say yourself, the technical quality of this photograph is poor, and it is very difficult for anyone besides you to see past the technical issues. To be quite honest, I don't think you should have uploaded it and asked for a critique with such a poor scan, unless your purpose was to ask for help with the scanning.

 

All that can be assessed is the composition. The pose and expression of the girl are potentially very nice. But I don't like the part of the guitar that is out of focus in the foreground: it competes with the girl's face, and in fact is bigger than her face.

 

The backgrounds are also problematic. That office building in the far background and (I think) the garbage can on the left detract significantly from the mood. It could be the scan again but the tree is too dark and there is not enough color/tonal separation between the tree and the girls head. Except for the head band she is wearing, her head would almost blend entirely with the tree. The picture would be much better without the tree.

 

 

Dr Fang, I prefer this to the color version. The image is now more abstract. Burning in the student's face is in line with this, and the wall in the center is now not an issue. The objects in the left background are still a bit of a distraction, although less so than before.

I see the chair was still there. As a furniture photographer myself, this is a picture I would have been proud to have taken -- much better than the previous version. The color and textures are wonderful. I don't agree with Vuk that going for a totally abstract, non-recognizable, picture would have been better -- I don't think it would have been as good. I've seen plenty of flaking-paint-on-the-wall pictures.

 

P.S. Did you have to remove the wooden block?

The face and the lighting on the face is beautiful, but the background is distracting. I suggest trying to burn in the background.

Very nice, but I think I would have removed the block of wood on the chair, even though some people might think that was cheating.

 

P.S. I wrote the above from the photocritique, then came back to read the other comments. Seems like the consensus is that the block has to go! While I think it would be cheating, say, to drive around with the chair in the back of your pickup and set it up in front of likely looking walls, small adjustments to "found" situations, like moving the block of wood, seem fair enough to me.

 

Hope the chair is still there and that the tenants of the building haven't insisted that the wall be painted.

This is very nice; but there is another picture almost identical to this that I've seen in the past two months on photo.net. So you might have a little trouble with your originality score.

This whole folder is terrific, but this is my favorite. The use of color and B&W to underscore that the painting and the two "critics" are from different worlds is very successful.

 

While the lighting, color, and translucence of the petals are indeed beautiful, I am a little disturbed by the fact that the central globe of petals almost sits on the bottom edge of the frame. I would have liked to see a bit more distance between it and the frame.

An enigmatic, moody image. The graininess contributes to the moodiness but detracts from the delicacy and detail of the veil. On the whole, I think I would prefer it a little less grainy. I wish her back were not so dark. Overall, a successful and unusual image.

The color, light, and mood are nice. The woman being blurred is not as bad as it might be because you can see this as contributing to the mood -- but the blurring is still pretty bad, and I find myself unable to get past it.

Fabulous! I wish I had taken this.

And so have I, Phil. Now if you could just show all of that in a photo to someone without your knowledge.

Well a 1/1 rating is definitely too harsh. But there do seem to be people who think that a photograph "submitted for world-wide rating" (as one person put it to me) should be an exceptional photo. For them, 1/1 means "not exceptional". If you get more than 1/1 from these people, you are doing well: it means you are minimally meeting their high/idiosyncratic standards.

 

Now regarding your photo: the problem with it is that the subject is two rocks and some driftwood -- not inherently interesting subjects. There is not enough detail in either the rocks or driftwood so that they can be appreciated for their abstract textures, etc. (This may be due to the scan.) To make it worse, the light is flat: no interest there. The objects are almost colorless: no interest there, either. And the arrangement of the rocks and driftwood is haphazard, so that the composition lacks a center of interest or any lines or structure that lead the eye through the photo.

 

In short, while technically competent (that is, properly focused and exposed) the photo is kind of boring.

Well, with all the comments preemptively and prospectively answering the criticism that has not actually been lodged against this photograph, it seems anti-climatic not to actually have that criticism appear. So, let me do the honors.

 

Whatever this may be, and appealing though it may be, it is not a photograph, and only some of the standards by which photographs are rated or critiqued apply. I hope there is a place on the Internet for work such as this, but I do not think that photo.net should be it.

Aura, a clever concept. I think it is a tad overexposed on the left side. Difficult to balance all of the exposures for these stitched images, I know. (Also, for this type of image, you could be somewhat more generous with the pixels.)

The comments on this photo are more interesting to me than the photo itself. The enthusiastic response it has received on the whole are not so much due to the form, content, and technical attributes of the photo itself, but to the circumstances in which it was taken, the context of the photo.

 

This photo is almost all context. Reacting only to what lies within the four corners of the photograph: some blurred rope, a tiny dot which might be a boat, a lot of almost detail-less garish blue sea, and some distant, out of focus, overexposed, buildings on a skewed horizon. All of this in an admittedly quite strong and dynamic composition.

 

What people are raving about is mostly not in the photograph itself. Suppose there were a sturdy tower at this location, and you could go up with your tripod in an elevator. And suppose this picture had been taken there on a day that a boat was for some reason moored to the tower by a rope. And suppose further thousands of people had been up this famous tower and had taken pictures, and we had all seen dozens of pictures from this vantage, including some that were perfectly sharp, with fabulous light, dramatic clouds and sea, tall ships parading by, Blue Angels whooshing across the sky, etc. What would we think of this picture then?

 

Aren't we all reacting to the presumed daring of the photograper, rather than to what can be seen in the photograph itself?

 

If I jumped out a thirty-story window with my Fuji disposable and no parachute and I clicked the shutter a few times on the way down, the resulting blurred pictures might be moving, shocking, sensational, and apparently one of them would be selected, posthumously, for Photograph of the Week. But would it be a great photograph?

 

Wonderful concept. The composition and color are great. These are only quibbles and I could be wrong, but I think there needs to be something (probably something white) that does not have a blue cast from the glass, and maybe (don't ask me how, though) a little more detail in the lace.

I love the reflections and the saturation of the colors.

What is this doing here? It doesn't look like a photograph to me.

This is nice, but I have seen many photographs on this theme. The geometry is interesting and is enhanced by the composition. The tonality is very appealing. But these elements lift it only a little above the ordinary.

Interesting view of a familiar subject. Good composition, superb color, lighting, and sharpness. I would have liked to have had some more technical details for such an excellent photograph. Is it a studio shot with a black backdrop and studio lighting?

The contrast between the lilies and the leaves is great, and so are the detail and sharpness of the lilies. I would have been tempted to zoom in on the lilies, but that picture probably wouldn't have been as good as yours: making them relatively small in a field of dark green leaves works very well. The very dark areas between the leaves add mystery.

 

Perhaps the lillies should be a little lower in the frame; they look to central to my eye -- but this is minor point.

 

You have managed to come up with a fresh view of a very familiar, if beautiful, subject.

 

Well, I disagree completely with the previous comment. Without the tree and the foreground, this would be yet another boring long-exposure blurred waterfall.

 

My only real criticism of this photograph is that the tree is not quite interesting enough to carry off such a prominent role, and it disturbs me a little that it is cut off by the top of the frame.

It isn't really symmetric, and it is the subtle asymmetry that makes the photograph interesting.

 

The asymmetry starts with elements that the architect designed: two types of stairs in the foreground, the cream structure on the right, and what look like white awnings on the left.

 

You have continued the theme through the positions of the people and ensuring that the disparate objects outside (red-brick building versus sky) were captured clearly.

 

Overall, a very successful image, one that I think the architect would be pleased by.