robin_betts

Pure Joy

I much prefer this to the first submission . It allows the viewer to peer into the subject in his or her own way. It reveals more humility on the part of the photographer in the face of the subject, more sensitivity, more tolerance of ambiguity. The skin textures are more sensual. When I first saw this picture, I thought someone had dropped in a Richard Avedon as a joke, but looking at the rest of your collection, I can see that isn't where you're going. The pictures where you do force yourself more on the subject become so much more illustration than observation, with so much more sentiment, that I find it hard to square them emotionally, to believe they were taken by the same person. I'm really curious about what nourishment you take from visual art other than photography, and what you intend. Forgive me if this blather is just the result of my not having tuned in properly - it's only possible because the quality of the photography is so outstanding.

This could live on a wall for a long time (indefinitely?) before it wore out.

 

Sometimes a picture goes flat, collapses, because the reason it was taken is too obvious. The photographer may has well have written the idea down, and not bothered to take a picture at all. Sometimes a picture can be very simple, but you've got to keep on going back to look at it, because it has a strong feel, and you can't work it out. You take a lot of those, IMO, and I think that's where you are strongest - ( examples [1] [2] [3] [4] ). Apart, I wouldn't know how to rate them. Together, they go somewhere I look forward to following them.

No one would ever think of taking this - but once it's there, it has to be. Lovely, enduring image. A lesson in composition, and sentiment.

The ambguities ensure this image can stand a lot of eye-time - mirror/no mirror? organic/inorganic? For a second, I thought it was something's spine.

The uneasiness of the composition in this picture is its strength. It throws us into the sky, tells us where we are and makes us feel the heat. "Something funny going on here", we think, off-balance, in the air, and then notice that the roof-joists are a little too regular, a little too perfectly round; the corners a little too sharp. We realise we are looking at an affluent, machine-made parody of adobe architecture, and that sets up all sorts of trains of thought, loving mockeries, which belie the apparent simplicity of the image at first sight.

If the composition had been a couch potato, had sat too comfortably, I don't think this would have worked nearly as well. Lief, I think you've been too negative about the 'lack of required elements' in some of your pictues - the oddnesses in this example, and even this one unfixed are going somewhere interesting with landscape. I hope you don't close the door on them.

P.S.. could you make your uploads a little smaller?

Gorgeous colour, texture and form. It's funny how much more I enjoyed this image in thumbnail, before being able to read the picture. Lots of things crossed my imagination, including Whistler's Mother! For me, the Home Sweet Home strips the picture of its ambiguity - 'collapses' it.

Have you ever seen a little movie called WonderRing by Stan Brakhage? I think you'd like it.....

I know you'd just finished reading about masks, and the picture packs a pretty punch .. but does the drop shadow help at all?

If I scroll the picture up in my browser, to crop just above the leftmost head, and imagine the sky on the right burnt in, I prefer the composition

The reflected backlight, and shafts, are lovely, and the crop is fine, but given you would have had to take this picture pretty fast, I guess, you were unlucky with the horizon.

The pinch-point where the boy's head meets the dark horizon line is over-strong in the composition, to my mind, and has the unfortunate effect of 'sticking' the horizon to the figure, destroying the natural perspective.

which a lot of the slicker photographers on PN (or commercial employers) wouldn't agree with ... careful not to learn too much! Looking at your portfolio, I see a natural eye for something quite unusual..

This picture depends on lots of lovely tensions, which keep the viewer in suspense, and looking at it (if he's me, anyway).

They include [abstract-optical] vs [representational], [repetition] vs [variation], [bleak] vs [humane] and [really there in front of the lens] vs [complete artifice].The enhanced version weakens some of these tensions, especially the last, and so, IMHO, weakens the picture.

Everyone's been talking about the colours, the reflection, the abstraction. I agree. On looking at the folder, this is the one I jumped to. There's nothing obvious about this picture.

But something else gets to me - the hint at a story inside the room, which through the most minimal clues, (window frame, cleanliness of the linen, suggestion of the neighbourhood,) acquires an surprisingly strong sense of place. I'm not sure that cropping out the bottom doesn't rob the picture of some of its 'spontanaety' - (even if the picture was contrived, that's part of the tension).

The reason I go for this is maybe not the reason you took it. The saturated colours. 'Odd' compoosition. Clipped legs in the background. Almost a parody of a colour separation postcard print.

I really like the straightforward simplicity, and the framing. Maybe this tweak loses the ear too much, but the frame does hold the near white.

Interested in how the viewing context affects a picture. If I saw this one, for example, largeish, pinned to a wall, I would think "Why the hell did someone take that?" and there would be the starting point. Here, on photonet, unless the reason is clear, the chances are a picture like that would be passed over as an accident. Probably right. Who knows? It may be.

The really magic pictures, for me, are the ones I can't justify - and I can't say 'this composition works because....', but which stick, and leave me in a very definite, non-verbal, emotional frame. Does a place like photonet conspire against 'unreasonable' pictures?

Truly beautiful, tender moment. I love the contrasts inside/outside - cramped stillness/swirling motion - and the hint of self-reference.. the inner frame is almost exactly a photographic gate.

It's the cinematic quality of this which excites me: the feeling that there are other frames that precede/may follow this one. I think the loose crop helps this.

For me, the important movement in this picture is rotational, around the vertical axis between the dancers. The whip zoom, however created, flatly contradicts this, and works against the original.

I love this photo enough to feel that it's worth work on the composition. The quality of the water is fantastic. Because of the 'skating' shadows, there is a really strong sense, too, of the atmosphere above it; the temperature, even the smell.

 

The pinch point of the pool against the frame on the right is very loud. If it was my picture (I wish), I would try cropping closer on the left, or extending on the right. I would also be worried by the area above the building on the left edge. Maybe that's just the loss in compression.

..actually the starting point, center, of a larger panorama, hand-

built.

Your crop, Drew, is the one.

Q: How do you shoot a sunset in a world where every other photo is a sunset, and the vast bulk of them have nothing to offer beyond the original event - in fact most diminish it?

A: Something like this.