brad_hiltbrand

Interesting composition but this phto has to be tack sharp for it to work. The overhead vantage point is not great for this shot.

What is this a picture of? There is no obvious subject.

Nice pose! But crop out almost everything except the cat.

Crop out most of the black and all of the light area on the far left and maybe...

Having just tried to photograph the Jelly displays at Monterey Bay aquarium I can appreciate how hard it is to take a good photo through glass. However, the composition is not great. The only interesting section of this image is in the lower left quadrant. The rest is wasteland.

Needs more contrast and fewer distracting elements (the stuff at the bottom of the frame is not helpful)

Another good BW conversion. I wish it was larger. I love the tonal range in this shot. Nice. The composition seems a little to centered. But maybe not :)

I like this a great deal. Perhaps it could be a tad darker to extend the tonal range. The composition is interesting, and somehow disconcerting.

Wow, a really great photograph. The light and composition are wonderful. The capture of that man's expression is fantastic. I loved Jack Kerouac's book the Dharma Bums, but I thought Kesey's bunch were called the Merry Pranksters. No matter, this image is great. Thanks for sharing.

OK, nice try at an abstract but the super grainy soft effect does not work and the plant on the right competes too strongly with your subject. Composition is poor.

I like this. It makes me wonder what he is thinking. Cropping out some of the distracting stuff on the right and the left might help as would have a shallower depth of field.

I like this a lot. Perhaps a little less depth of field making the background less distracting would have helped.

Sam, I'll try to be nice, but will probably fail.

 

First, the only reason I am commenting on this photograph is because of your recent rating of a photo of mine as a 2 for aesthetics (2 means BAD). My photograph is not BAD, although I can understand that you may not like it. Please do not run around pushing ratings buttons on a whim. It does not help anyone. I would much rather recieve constructive comments than ratings, but low ratings by members without a clue about photography are annoying, frustrating, and deserving of comment in themselves.

 

My photograph is properly exposed, in focus front to back, was taken with care and clear intent, has some artistic merit, and was properly sized for submission to photonet.

 

Your submission above on the other hand shares NONE of those attibutes. On purely technical grounds, your photograph sucks. It is out of focus, poorly lighted, framed rather awkwardly, and is ugly. And on top of all those faults, it is a rather blatant violation of photonet uploading policy. Your submissions are REQUIRED to be less than 600K Pixels. That means resizing your digicam output down to something like 800 X 600 pixels (540 K pixels). This makes it much easier to adhere to the 100KByte file storage size limit also. This saves bandwidth and makes your photograph viewable to others on this site who use standard size monitors. Few of us have the luxury of owning displays that can accomodate a 2500 pixel long photograph. Please read the posting guidlines and the guidlines for rating photographs. As a new member, you would be wise to avoid posting and rating until you understand the purpose of of this site.

 

If you want to rate photographs as BAD, please feel free to do so. I am certain that you will now start looking for more of my photos to trash. But have the courtesy to explain why you feel they are BAD. Otherwise, folks will begin to think you are just a BAD man. Notice that I have not rated this photograph, it is not worth the effort to push the 1 button for Very Bad. But your callous disregard for forum policy and your poor rating of a photograph that is hardly well below average for images on this site is worth this rant. Now, I feel better. Hope you do as well.

 

Oh, welcome to Photonet Sam!

 

Hoover Tower at dusk with water fountain. I tried to balance the

exposure to get good detail and motion in the water and capture

the warm light on the tower at sunset. Photographing tall

structures like this with a wide angle lens is a challenge without

large format lens movements (the 55 mm lens on this medium

format camera is equivalent to a 33 mm lens in 35mm format).

Photographing this tower anywhere but straight on results in

gross distortions of perspective. I like this shot but wish they had

lights on the fountain :) I also wish I had used a polarizer on this

shot. Photographs taken a few minutes later from a different

location had a much darker sky and different feel, but the

fountain was greatly diminished in relative size. I like this

perspective more.

 

Comments and suggestions are welcomed.

Golden Gate Bridge on a typical foggy summer afternoon in San

Francisco. I tried converting this image to BW but decided I like it

in color more. The scene was almost monochromatic anyway,

but the hint of red on the bridge makes this image better, and is

more like the scene I saw. There is a seagull just above and to

the right of the bridge. In the original high res scan it is sharp

and clearly a flying bird. In this compressed low res image it

looks like dust, but I decided to leave it in anyway. Serious

comments and suggestions are appreciated.

Photograph of sunrise from Windy Hill Summit in Palo Alto. I've

been getting up early recently trying to take sunrise shots from

around this location above silicon valley and the lower SF bay.

Most suffer from too much fog, or too little foreground interest.

There was a thunderstorm over the mountains on the other side

of the bay the morning this photograph was taken, but I missed

capturing any of the lightening. I like this shot with my daughter

and dog taking in what my daughter called "the fireball", but what

do others think? Serious comments and suggestions are

appreciated.

A really poor translation of Jorge's teknik from his web site:

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The photographies shown here developed without exception with the?Lightbrush? technology. This technology is probably one of the most complex kinds of the photography. The pictures develop, after sorgfaltiger planning in perfect darkness, whereby each light is produced,   each color and each shade carefully with a ray of light. The exposure times lie here between 5 - 15 min.. are used in a picture up to ten different, hand-guided sources of light successively. I never use lightnings. The light would be too intensive and could therefore also not so well be controlled. Also vorbelichtungen, approximately with strongly reduced lightning, would lead to the decrease of the lighting effect. With some pictures I change the screen in an exposure break, or move the focusing ring manually into another, before exactly specified position, before I continue with the exposure. Photometry is relevant only with nocturnal field recordings. To cover with it the low light of the sky will is enough too intensively it often simply the top of the objective with a screen?

----------------------------------------------------------------

 

OK, from what I can figure out, the subject is in total darkness, you open the shutter, and then paint the subject with your 'lightbrush' and capture the whole thing in one or multiple exposures in the same frame. Very impressive! Your results speak for themselves. Thanks for sharing your work with us. If you can shed any more light on the mystery of your technique than the poor translation above reveals, please do so.

This and the other images in your 'lightbrush' folder are fantastic! Really beautiful.

 

But a quick look through that folder reveals technical comments on some photos of "painted with light" and others the use of a "lightbrush with a krypton bulb, ca 4 minutes (time highly variable from photo to photo). So what exactly is a lightbrush? Are these 'straight' photographs or something else?

I'm not sure if Hanna and Peter are correct about adding some breathing room between the two main subjects, but it is worth exploring when I go back to Bodie. I took only this single frame of this subject so have no other perspectives to compare at this time.

 

I really appreciate your comment Peter about this not being a 'Bodie workshop' photo. I didn't really plan it, didn't particularly like the color version, but found this BW version interesting. I like it more and more every time I look at it. It is by far the most interesting and original image I made that afternoon.

 

Maybe the composition could have been better, but then a change in position might have dramatically changed the way the light works in this photo. Spacing out the boiler and the gears would introduce new elements to the center of the image that might not be helpful. What I like most is the tonal range and play of light on the geometric arrangement of circular forms.

 

I rarely do this BW conversion thing to color film. In this case this luminescence channel alone provided the most pleasing image instead of mixing color channels underlying the BW image. I tried a number of different techniques, but kept coming back to this simple version. This was my first experience trying E100SW as a BW film. I like the results a lot. I have tried this with Velvia and E100VS slides but have not liked the results. I think they have too much contrast for this purpose and perhaps E100SW is better suited for BW conversion.

A recent trip to the Sierra's included a day trip to the old mining

town of Bodie. I was there around noon, hardly the best light of

the day, and the town is so photographed that almost any shot

there has been done. Over and over again. It's hard to find

anything new to shoot :)

 

I like this photograph in color too, but the tonal range and

textures in this shot converted to BW from E100SW color slide

film make this version more interesting.

 

Any comments or suggestions? I am not certain this

composition works. What do you think?

This was taken on a recent trip to the Sierra Nevada. A short side

trip to Bodie produced several nice photographs, even though I

had to shoot around noon. This little girl's headstone is known

as the Angel of Bodie and looks down over the notorious old

west mining town. Evelyn's parents obviously loved that little girl.

I hope you like this image.

 

The sculpter was obviously very talented, but what could I have

done better in taking this photograph?

I submitted an earlier scan of this image for critique, but

continued tweaking in photoshop (crop, curves, brightness, color

adjustments). I am happier with this image, although its redder

tone evokes a different emotional feel compared to its blue-cast

sibling.

 

This is a square crop of the top 2/3 of a 645 frame. Although the

result of the crop leaves the horizon almost at midline, the

composition is balanced by the several leading lines and shifts

in color in the sky and on the beach. The true center of the image

is in the red reflection on the white part of the surf. I don't

normally shoot 'square', but this image seems to work.

Definitely a unique perspective on familiar subject. Nice job!

After scrolling up and down several times, looking closely the original photograph with its tilted horizon, and the straightened image, I prefer the feel of the former more. It provides an odd tension which twists ones vision a little and provides a drain for the water in the lower right corner. It creates movement in an otherwise still scene.

 

The image is altogether more mysterious and 'better' with the horizon tilted. It may violate a standard rule of landscape images, but this picture is something that allows for some rule breaking. The tilted image makes you think. The straightened image is not nearly so interesting.

You're funny Regina. This is an absolutely fantastic image. The composition is very nice, drawn in thirds by the horizontal upper branch, the vertical trees, and the skewed foreground reflections at an angle that beckon the viewer to linger on this surrealistic and almost monochromatic scene. Wonderful!