Sandeha Lynch

This is a very different step ... and great to see the dramatic colors - index finger center-stage.

Interesting to see it, Colin. I checked out the MPP site a while back. But that isn't the standard lens, is it?

It's a bit like a box of assorted chocolates, Carl ... they're all good, but the coffee leaves an after-taste, the orange is a bit too sweet, and I'd come back for the cooler mint flavor again and again but for that drop of cherry stuck between the teeth. Keys, I mean, (I guess I was getting carried away with the metaphor.)

Haleh, your title is original. I was cheating a little as 'postcard from the edge' is not an original of mine, but from a book. Yet that is how it struck me, and it seemed appropriate because ... (do you know Nick Bantock - mainly a painter, but he mixes media? Find his work, and you'll see why 'postcard' came to mind. :-)

This is great, what the 20mm was made for. I'll be in Bologna this June so maybe I should take a trip over to Pisa as well.

Like a postcard from the edge ... excellent.

Not goofy, but chaotic. I guess this may be full frame, Bill? I'd suggest some serious cropping if you're looking for some Zen harmony ... at least, IMO, this would remove the top-heavy feel to the composition and allow the rock to behave like an anchor rather than a broken tooth. I know, I know, but compared with your portfolio this one looks like it needs some thought.

... of the articulate image. One of the things I enjoy about photography compared with other visual techniques is that 'capture' and 'creation' have equal value. Both are available to the photographer who can recognise the image as it forms. What happens later, as you say, depends on the viewer ...

Eh ... one reads some funny things here and about, Pnina. Yet, apart from the beautiful hair, the angle of her pose, the detail of the dress, the shadow and the wall, and the apricot, (which I guess you have a thing for) few seem to have noted the almost Hitchcockian slatted chair-back. I'm serious ... the slits of light through the chair create a superb anti-focal point; almost menacing, but small enough to be 'safe'. I think you've crossed a border between the real and the normal, and the dreamworld of the stage. I wonder how you would explain it? Purely pictorial, or have you been touched by some searching idea?

... what if it were yellow? It's a bit of a can of worms this, but it is said that the combination of yellow and black is the most threatening warning that colour-detecting eyes respond to - think wasps, think British traffic police. Would a yellow ground provoke the same response, (generate the same ratings ;) Is the colour code really a biological response or is it an ancestral myth? Can the colour issue be separated from similar assumptions that are made regarding shape and dynamics? (Now I am even wondering how this would strike people in BW with selenium toning???)

Carl, I figured it would be subconcious, and as a flute player I understand your analogy of pitch - some critics must find it convenient to assume that we (should) all read images to an equal tempered scale, but the basis of music is a 'just' scale. (I bow to your expertise on that one, I only play 12-bar blues.)

I was reading about the role of synaesthesia in creativity a while back - the facility for 'seeing' taste, or 'hearing' colors. It's quite strange, but it seems to operate at a deeper level than left/right brain polarity, and it's likely that it enhances left/right communication. Perhaps, given the variations among people, it may help explain why some are so drawn to line and others to color, or why certain forms of abstraction can appeal to many or to few. One time, in a room of a dozen people, I was the only person who expressed an affinity for Mondrian's harmonies - whereas three of the group couldn't see anything valid in Jackson Pollock. Synaesthesia is not in any sense a magic bullet for being creative, but I think it probably influences our appreciation of form and direction.

The idea that we 'only' read images up from the lower left is a nonsense even if it is the more common point of entry for users of western alphabets. And what Michael Chang wrote about Chinese is also true for Arabic speakers. I've read that nomadic, non-literate Arabs, (of which there are obviously relatively few these days) have no instant recognition of the perfect right angle which is bred into us in the western world. Nurture, and nature; but for every single 'norm' that can be described there are also a dozen others.

"I learned a while back that I have lots of leading lines coming in from the lower right corner instead of the lower left, and that's due to left eye / right eye dominance issues."

It's that word "instead" that bothers me a bit, as your critic seems to be implying that for the sake of appealing to human norms, (left eye/right eye) you actually should have your leading lines coming up from lower left. This might affect public "appeal" but intellectual "challenge" often strikes me as more important in the visual arts.

What I like here is that the lines and the tonal weight lift you out, up, and beyond the image frame without any sense of wanting to know what lies beyond. In synaesthetic terms it's a bit like a rollercoaster that brings you back to where you started - with a whoosh in the stomach and so on. Some of your other shots of the building have a smoother flow - monodirectional if you will - but this has both a centrifugal and a centripetal force - to my eye.

You might be interested in Rudolf Arnheim's The Power of the Center or some of Piet Mondrian's writings on Dynamic Equilibrium, but for a real long weekend, try Ernst Gombrich's The Sense of Order which goes into the psychology of patterns in some depth.

"Does it seem top heavy?" Not in the slightest.

Yes, lots of good lines there, and all the tones in the right place. Luck, or did you make him swing a few times?

Pnina, it didn't need the explicit title; you've caught the ambience very well, as much through the expression of the woman as through the light, the composition, and the components. Worthy of a series, I'd say.

I've seen lots of views of this, but this is the first that sparkles. And nice off-centering as well.

It's an eyecatching composition, but right as it stands it's like - needs work to clarify everything.

Thoughtfully done, like it. (But just a little more shoe might help.)

And cropped well with an appropriate frame. Good.

All these women lying on the beach remind me of a snowfall ... better get my eyes checked.

Ray Bradbury meets Tom& Jerry, and it's a great mood piece. Jay, I had to come straight over - your 3 comments just blew me awyaa: exactly the response I'd have wished for each shot. Thanks. (Hey, just been looking at this through a 35mm slide frame ... you know you could do a great vertical crop on this? :-)

Yup. You got it. Power of the future.

If this is a "first communion" portrait in ethnic dress then the stiffness of the pose makes good sense, as do the clothes themselves. LESS light around her feet would have helped emphasise the halo effect, but to perfect the shot you want better left/right symmetry; she isn't dead center, but she should be. Better cropping would help while also getting rid of the strip of bare floor. You could probably stand her a little further back another time, but this shot can be tidied up.

Well if it were one of those semaphore operators on aircraft carriers flagging the planes in, the armpits would seem appropriate...

Glad you said it's a 'he' Carl ...I mean, those hairy armpits !

Stunning shot. There's a lake high in the Dolomites in Italy with the same colour.