glenn_polin

The kids are wonderful! I can't help wishing that the window blinds and the wall texture were not so crisp. To me, they detract a little. I keep "seeing" the rectangular window frame distracting me from the wonderful geometry the kids are making.

Oscar,

I have many photos like this, that have an emotional meaning to me, because I was there, or I have a relationship to the participants, but when I show them to others, they don't experience the emotions I am having. When critiqued, people then look at the purely visual, and (rightly) find fault.

 

My experience here is that the bushes and the house all distract from the emotional meaning.

 

The man's face, his emotion and his situation are what is meaningful, but how to show it to others?

 

I resort to Photoshop to try to change the photo or reduce it to something that might communicate my meaning. Now that I have looked at your photo for some time now, I have come to focus on the man and the look on this face. His emotion and his situation. Reducing it helps me to really see what I think you saw.

I just noticed that you had 5000 views of this photo...I must be wrong about the lack of emotion, the photo must be evoking some kind of emotions to get that high of a viewership.

 

I'm afraid my opinion is really at deviance with the vast majority...again!

 

 

It has a wonderful sense of depth. Very pleasing in the large size; I want it to be even bigger so I can see more detail.

Jeroen,

 

Since everyone else liked this, I think I could play a role by saying that I don't really like it. It doesn't appeal or speak to me in any way. Your revision is better but still leaves me cold. What I have been waiting for is the understanding of why I am unmoved.

 

Technically, it seems like a "good enough" picture. And yes, I would whip out the macro lens and photograph this. So I think it is composition and your relationship to it that bothers me. It feels like a photo with two somewhat identical objects of interest in either corner, and no real relationship between them. And perhaps no relationship between the photographer and the subject; just frame the two objects and shoot.

 

This all is probably reading too much into the photo but I keep looking at it and wondering why I don't feel anything, and that's my (current) best shot at explaining why.

The portrait had an immediate impact on me. Very powerful.

Wayne, I understand your fascination with the scene here. I would have photographed it too, and probably spent a lot of time on it.

 

But when I first looked at the photo, I looked away immediately and did not want to come back to it. It just seemed too complicated, too unpleasant, with too many conflicting elements for me to take in, process and enjoy.

 

I've now returned to it several weeks later (this forum moves at a glacial pace!)...and I like it better, but I still feel you have given us too much. The detritus at the bottom edge of the picture really doesn't add much -- in fact it detracts.

 

Subject to the limitations of the equipment and your position, what would begin to achieve simplification is to go inside the car, like the picture I have attached. The world outside the car is still there, but now you are inside the car, seeing the outside through the no-longer-there windows.

Jesse,

 

I want to say that the picture "doesn't work," but what I mean, of course, is that it doesn't hold my attention at all. There are three moderately interesting elements, but compositionally it is diffuse, with nothing to hold my attention or make it into a compelling photo.

 

I did a moderate rack of my brains on how to make it more interesting to me, and I came up with the following.

 

(1) There is too much sky and within the sky, not enough contrast.

 

(2) The interesting elements don't relate to each other, IMO.

 

I played with various treatments of the images, but what finally worked for me is to take a fragment of the image, and orient it vertically.

 

When I did that, and a few other minor PS alterations to increase depth, I "saw" what was interesting to me; that the balloon, clouds and vapor trails were all at different heights. Suddenly it came alive for me.

Thirumale,

 

I love the original version you posted, with the cropping. I looked at it when you first posted it and thought it was great then, and I like it as much now. There are probably some minor things that could improve it in printing/color adjustment, etc, but I am not expert in that stuff, and so I defer.

 

I don't like the cropped version suggested above; I like the original composition the way you cropped it: the boy is in the corner, with the shoe and the steps leading to the dark doorway. Oddly, I think the porthole/hole in the wall helps really make the composition by breaking up the wall and providing another simple element.

 

It's weeks after I first saw it and I still feel both the rightness of the composition and the treatment of the subject.

 

Bravo!

I like the high contrast, but the wall behind the men looked like a dull piece of plywood. In my retake, I brightened the image, did a crude job lightening the worker's faces, and gave more emphasis to the texture on the plywood wall. (If you look at the far right hand side of mine, you can see where I stopped "enhancing" the wall.

 

I think it needs something like this (selective lightening/darkening/accenting to make the picture more lively.

 

The reason everyone is fussing at the foreground is that you didn't give us much to draw the eye in the photo. The snow seems colorless and featureless.

 

Yet there is a hint of a form there, a darker area of snow that could be burned in to lend interest and lead the eye toward the action at the rear.

 

The above photo maybe pushes the effect too far; it is here to demonstrate the idea, not perfect it. I have added a little red tint to it as well. The snow is never really all white, but that's what it looked like in your foreground. Now that I think of it, a blue tint would probably have been better--it would look more realistic, as snow often has a blue tint.

Jeroen, I like your original photograph and format and the angle you chose very much. The window light and the curtains very much add to the portrait. What comes through is a man sitting inside, and his separation from the world outside. I feel him isolated by his own choice. He looks not so much tired to me but rather more determined to keep the world at bay. By keeping a measure of control, he keeps a measure of dignity, which is important to him.

 

Only the object on the furniture behind the chair detracts from the photo; I love the way you are drawn into the photo by the angles of the chair and the window. A very fine portrait.

Oscar, it is a fine photo and would stand on its own without knowing who the artist is. I would only question whether you might want to crop a little bit at the top, and whether you might want to remove the light "blob" in the lower right in post processing.

I came upon this again several months after I initially rated it...it has grown on me. Emotionally, it is very powerful.

I love the composition and the use of the rings.

Other than adjusting the levels to make true blacks in the picture, there is nothing I would do to this. It is just fine...very pleasing. I like the perspective of the shot very much.

 

Can you comment here or send me an email about what this film enables you do? I see ISO 3200 and am intrigued (I am digital and lack experience with professional films...)

 

This remind me of photos I have seen of a field and there may be just one object outstanding in the field, but that one object (the horse, of course) makes the difference between an empty field and a live photo showing a relationship between things. So here I am wishing for a horse, which in this case would be a ship or something in the upper to middle left to give more scale and definition to the beautiful but empty sea.

Sorry, Wayne, but I couldn't resist. Some don't think its photgraphy anymore when it goes this far, but all is fair in love and art. If it disturbs the creative process here, I'll delete it. To me, this is more whimsical.

To me what is pleasing and interesting about this is the blue light, sand and water. The blue saturation is very interesting, and as the author said, a light you only get at the end of the day.

 

However, the same light or treatment has done a dis-service to the wood. The wood, which should by some rights be the central focus of the picture, has a lot of the same dark blue. On the wood, it is not so attractive. It obscures the interesting character and texture of the wood.

 

Then the composition; it seems wrong to me. You have the central object pretty much in the middle, and the law of thirds has been violated (call the composition police!)

 

I tried it vertically and with some cropping and it seems more pleasing to me. Even the wood doesn't seem so dark and blue to me, since the broad expanse of blue above it (it would be to the the right of it in the vertical picture) is now gone.

 

I've been pondering this on and off for a few days, because not only doesn't the picture attract me, I actually don't like to look at it. I was interested in why that is, since others seem to like it.

 

(1) One thing is that I don't see the picture as a "whole". I see parts of the picture, the top leaves, the bottom leaves, and the middle, but there is no movement.

 

(2) Someone mentioned above that there is a slight sense of vertigo from being above the bench.

 

(3) The only place my eye is led is from the bench to the sidewalk in the upper left, and that is an uninteresting part of the picture.

 

(4) Nothing appears to be in sharp focus, and even the bench does not appear to be the central object of the picture.

Congratulations.

If you hadn't told me what this was, I never would have guessed. So if your intention was to produce a recognizable image, you would have failed on me, and I think many others. Only those media savvy types who would have recognized the actors might get it.

 

As a pure image, I find it disturbing, because I can't tell what's going on, what you are blurring. It could be a nude shot with the woman's body blurred by action. There is something distressing about it, because it just looks slightly unsavory to me, like maybe if I could see it better I wouldn't like what I see. Is she trying to get away from him? What saves it from unsavoriness are the two faces which have a kind of pure look not associated with vice.

 

The "NIC" at the bottom would be a complete mystery if you hadn't explained it to me. Perhaps in a media hungry culture lots of people would get it and "dig" it; to me the image on its own doesn't draw me in or make me want to examine it further.

How about "Waiting" or "Empty"; that's what the scene suggests to me, the absence of the human rear end (and front) that is meant to occupy the bench. "Absence"; "A Place to Sit" "A Fall Bench" if you like to be more concrete (or "A Bench in Fall") Or "An Empty Bench in Autumn" To me the emptiness is the primary feature of the photo.

Our words are inadequate to describe the multitude of expressions on people's faces...so what if people aren't good actors and can't portray emotion precisely. The look is everything.

 

This is a fine photo. But if it were mine, I would not create any cultural context for the human face. It just is. Remove the title about Japanese darts, blur the background, and let the viewer behold the mystery of themselves, reflected in another person's face.

 

On the right hand side where her ear should be, is that her ear or part of the dartboard? I would get rid of it; it keeps attracting my attention.

As I am interested in mother/child relationships, what strikes me here is the child relating to the mother and the mother relating to the outsider. Everything else is clutter, so I suppose the cropped photo is better, because the relationship is more front and center.

 

You could now go the next step, if you are not a purist, and try to remove the clutter from the background. It sadly does detract. Hours of work to get rid of it neatly (at least for me) and an uncertain result. But then you would have a photo about only one thing: the two relationships.