philip_coggan

Technical critiques wanted - how it could have been improved (whether

it was worth doing at all is also valid).

Excellent - I love the slightly spooky sense from the child's movement in this setting. Would also look good duotoned (even spookier). Not sure how the ratings system is meant to work - is 7 reserved for Steve McCurry? - so I'll rate it down a bit from there, but really about as good as it can be in my opinion.

You've used too much flash, and the background is not so great-looking. Try taking it in sunlight or thin shadow (like an overcast day, or in the sahdow of a building), no flash at all, and with a background that doesn't 'jump out' (erd jumps out). You could also rty some more imaginative framing - take just his eyes, for example, with yuor kids behind.

I've been flipping thru the pics asking for ratings - uniformly, every pic gets 4-point-something! Which means every pic is average. Logic suggests this cannot be so.

 

Anyway, about this pic: In my view the faults outweigh the positives. The positives are a nice if unadventurous composition (the diagonal of pagodas leading through the picture plane); against that, the colours in the bricks look over-blown, and the sky is white. (No doubt it really was white at the time - but it doesn't look good).

 

I don't know why the bricks look like that - oversaturation, over-use of colour burn, could be anything. And Lord knows, this might be exactly what came out of the camera. But the point is that it looks unrealistic, and therefore is disturbing. Same for the sky.

 

Beyond that, I think you need to find a more original approach to photogrpahing these monuments - this is the same scene that you see on a thousand postcards. How to be original, that's the big problem of course :).

 

Don't be insulted by my possibly tactless remarks - but here on PNet it seems everyone is a genius and every photo is by Steve McCurry.

This is a lovely photo. But one thing disturbs me, and quite badly: if you look at the dark, right-hand edge of the model's body, you see it follows a line that doesn't represent the line of the body at all - in fact it makes her look as if she has an extremely thin leg joined to a very thick torso. This must surely be a trick of the light, but it looks very strange. Perhaps you could crop in much closer to the body, so that this false impression is removed?

Thanks Frederic. I think the erason for your photo is the same as mine: childern playing with violence will lead only to more violence. My photo was taken at a place outside Phnom Penh called the 'shooting gallery', where the Cambodian army allows people to fire guns at targets. It's quite well run, adn not dangerous at all. But there's no age restriction.

I looked up Kuakata to find out where it was, and it's in Bangladesh! Far southern tip, near the Myanmar border (near Teknaf I imagine). I lived in Bangladesh 2 years and never heard of it! So now you make me think I have to go and visit. What were you doing down there?

 

Philip.

I wonder what's up with the black cockatoos? We have them here in Canberra too - but only since last year. Before that, you never saw one in an urban area. Can it be the drought?

 

Thes white ones (called Sulphur Crested cockatoos - but white cockatoos would be more descriptive) are in almost plague po=roportions in Canberra, and alawys have been. They've adapted very nicely to the pine plantations all round the city - they live on pine cones. They're extremely destructive birds, very messy feeders - a gang has just defoliated a bloodwood near me.

 

Australia is bird heaven. Australian animals are pretty dun and uncolourful - as if to escape the notice of predators (which is odd, as there aren't any). To make up for it, the birds are incredibly varied and beautiful.

First, congrats to Steve.

Second, regrets that I left it so very late to put my oar in.

 

And finally, awe-struck admiration to Mike Seeward! Wow, what a business scheme! For all those who haven't visited Mike's site, put simply, he asks people to sponser his travel - they pay up-front, he goes off and takes photos in exotic places, and when he comes back they get to chose a photo. Lord, why didn't I think of that!

Your coloured and manipulated images are very striking, yet I prefer the simplicity of this traditional image - the gentle nature of the child is allowed to shine through, unobscured.

Terje - I'm coming very late to this discussion, as I don't visit often, but I was delighted to see this chosen as POW. It has such simple elegance, and I can see it used commercially - a book cover, advertising ...

 

Philip.

A charming photo of a very pretty little girl - but do try to avoid cliche shots (children, indeed anyone, smiling into the camera, is a cliched way to take portraits).

Forgive me for being obtuse, but why all this discussion of this pic in terms of graveyards? The photogrpaher doesn't say it's got anything to do with graves (it's titled "Memories", not "Grief"), and so far as I can see the first person to bring this idea in one of the early commentators after it became POW - everyone seems to have adopted the reading from that point on. But it's Memories that's the subject, not graves and grief.

 

Personally, I admire the technical perfection of this photo, but the shiny surface gives no grip to my emotional involvement - meaning I'm not convinced for a moment that this girl is other than acting. That's not a fault by any means, but it is one of the parameters of my reaction.

The KR were driven out of power in 1979, but fighting continued in more remote areas - including the provinces north of Siem Reap - until the final government offensive in 1997. That same year saw a peak in landmine injuries - largely soldiers going up into KR jungle teritory, but also peasants returning to land that the KR had vacated. So the boy's parents could have been caught up in that last campaign. Casualties now are down to about 700 or so a year.

 

ICBL (the International Campaign to Ban Landmines) has a photo-library, and many NGOs go there for their pics - http://www.icbl.org/imagelibrary/Photographers. This would be a good image for them, but I'm afraid they can't afford to pay...

Fake?

Beautiful of course! If you ever get to West Africa, at Nouakchott in Mauretania near the Moroccan border there's a whole bay full of abandoned fishing trawlers, some sunk, some rusting away. And all up that coast, which is mostly a long line of cliffs with a beach at the bottom, there are trawlers that have washed ashore. Great for pictures, should you get the chance.

It's a very nice photo. The man looks busy. Tired, too. I'm glad I'm not him. I wonder if he's glad he's not me?

The rules of composition are not rules, they're guidelines. They were produced from an analysis of traditional Western painting, the kind that was established during the Renaissance, and which aimed at producing a 3D, realistic look. Follow the rules, and you'll get that look.

 

Yet the rules are, at bottom, just plain silly. Lines should go from left to right? That's because we Westerners read and wriet from left to right. Chinese photographers should presumably get their lines going from top to bottom. Rule of thirds? That's based on producing the illusion of space through perspective through producing a screen of diminishing rectangles. Poor old Picasso didn't know squat.

 

What I'm saying is, don't think you're missing something by ignoring the rules. You have a good eye, you don't need that particular set of visual crutches.

 

The truly ironic thing about the photogrpahers' rulebook is that at the very moment when it was being drawn up - in an attempt to make photogrpahy respectable as an art by making photos look more like paintings - artists were tearing the whole thing up and going back to the the per-renaissance, and to Asia and Oceania and Africa, to ernew the way they approached the world. Result: follow the rules as taught in the camera clubs, and you'll find yourself with a tried and tested formula for producing dull and unimaginative compositions.

Gives a good sense of scale. Nice colours, too.

It's a nice photo of its type, but does it rise above its type?

Nice. Wonder if the clouds could be given some extra punch by running a brush loaded with grey in Colour Burn mode over the sky? (Sorry but I'm too lazy to try it out for myself - but it's a technicque that workds on clousd and blue skys, darening the blue and leaving the white clouds untouched).

Nice image. But if there's a candle in that glass thing in the front, it's way overexposed. (And if there's not, then I have no idea what's creating the light source). You wouildn't be Dave McCracken from TMAC by any chance?

I agree with Mark that there's a lot of potential here. (And I confess I thought at first these were pebbles in water!). As he says, it's worth trying htis some more to see what you can get out of it. It has an odd, almost surreal feel to it.

Ummmmm ... it's a photo of a shovel ... ummmmm ... errr ... yes, you've captured the character of the shovel very well, to be sure ... it's a working-class shovel, yep, I see that .... ummmm .... moody sort of lighting .... lived a hard life, has this shovel ... possibly subject to periodic fits of depression, possibly ... a depressed shovel ... but very earthy ... it's a shovel ...

Re Mr Wagner's comment: It seems one picture is not, after all, worth a thousand words :-).