john falkenstine

Way at the bottom in this image there is the main highway through

Clifton and Morenci. It snakes its way up the hill and then through

the mountains in the background, through a tortuous series of

switchbacks. Its 140 miles to Springerville, Alpine a bit less.

Large trucks should not take this road, and in wintertime it is often

impassable. Ranches in this area send their children to boarding

school. Wolves roam the upper reaches. the State Highway number 666

was fitting, but it has been given the bland new number of 191.

In this image, taken by holding the camera in Mid-air to dampen the

shaking of the truck, I am being passed by a pricy rig; a semi

tractor with a horse trailer. At slightly over 75 mph I am the

slowpoke here. The trucks are doing 80 or better (That's almost 130

kilometers per hours). The lighting is great, that terrific

Arizona/Mexico blue sky. No exposure tricks done here, its a direct

take off a raw file. Taken slightly west of Willcox.

While its not a super image (shot through a dirty windshield) and also some dog drool on the lens (how did that get there?) I put it up for a look at an Arizona Sky at sunset. No saturation or trick here aside from adjustmenting the image using the histogram, no saturation or special trick as is done too often. This is what is looks like. I deliberately waiting until the sun dropped below the horizon.

Similar to Bisbee, CLIFTON is not as accessible and as a result its

downtown is virtually dead, even though the huge copper mine that

helped build it is thriving. As Bisbee was settling down into a pot-

filled haze of hippies living in cheap housing, Clifton became

embroiled in violent labor demonstrations. Since then its just been

taking a long nap.

With the price of copper, some mining towns are booming as if the

1890's had returned. This is Morenci-miner's housing here. New houses

are being rapidly installed in the foreground. They're close

together, not as nice as the older houses. Its a living, the

paychecks are decent. A new version of Bisbee in the making.

This time I only photographed quickly, passing through for a gas stop. The last time I was here in January it was bitterly cold. But as I started photographing back then, I was immediately watched. At this point the light was about gone. My dog had drooled on the lens, so I could only point the camera a certain way to hide the issue. This lens is a Sigma 10-30mm, not too bad but bulky and the front element protrudes.

Photography in the Southwest. Best thing to have is a TRUCK. Four

wheel drive. Air Conditioning. The scenery is great, but the

distances are long, and it is estimated that some 50% of roads in

Arizona are unpaved. 300+miles this last Saturday. This image taken

looking southwest toward Mt. Graham. Its windy and dust is blowing

through the valley. The former official name for this highway

was "666"

In the R/H Corner the remnants of the engine can be seen. Its a project "gone bad"

Nice exposure quality, aside from that I find it the standard staring face photograph.

I suspect the original image might be quite nice, but I find this badly manipulated. While the 2 boys appear perfectly exposed, the rest of the image is overexposed and washed out; nothing really matches. I also find the excessive number of ratings in one category suspicious. This means that somebody has been "hunting" the image down through the submittal stack, just to give it a high rating, a good sign that some cheating is going on here. Most images are only visible for a limited amount of time, so once you get more than 15 ratings a rat starts to smell somewhere.

in remote CLIFTON, Arizona, built in 1911 when Arizona was not even a

state, and Native Americans were still being forced onto

reservations, THIS Courthouse was the seat of power in this remote

area. It is still so. Well-preserved and high upon a hill, the

message here is one of power. Many native Americans have now returned

to work in the giant coppermine right up the highway from this place.

Photographed on a late Saturday afternoon, no polarizer used.

I like the composition but; many blown out highlights and not sharp enough. Shoot into bright light and you will lose, light will win. In this case I would have NOT taken the image, or applied a highly diffused flash. The camera should have metered off the wall. Unfortunately, despite the hefty price tags, most newer DSLrs cannot take multiple meter readings to give you more information. BTW: Your personal image with the Nikon is backward.

Wow, this looks like German 2nd class train from the sixties/fifties, right down to the gold anodized aluminum trim.

What's going on with the upper part of the sky? I'm not one of those who is always telling people to crop; your image should be OK without cropping. In this case I would have preffered somewhat different lighting with the boat being highlighted more and some of the saturation removed. Such steps would make the image more interesting and give it some depth of field. And the upper part of that sky is too dark for this kind of picture.

I find this image overproccessed. The boats and the sky have almost similar coloration. This gives the image a flat and drab appearance.

A somewhat un-natural looking sky.

Concrete proof that the rating system at photo.net is rotten to the core.

Looks like old film and overexposed; here is the fix.

Nice image technically, hands a bit unsharp, nice lighting. But in terms of subject matter I think its very posed, very rigid and un-natural and quite archaic, reminding me of the basic "man with turban type photography" that has been around ever since photography and photographers found men wearing Turbans or other type of head dress. (Such as "American Indian with feather in hair") The lack of technical review and the extensive praise gallery to me show a lack of technical understanding, and and almost escapist type of behavior. I challenge the photographer to apply his skills to a more interesting and dynamic subject matter. If this was a photography class, I would forbid Rakesh from submitting anymore images like this and demand more work "outside the box"

Ok, you're forced to go on one of these horrible budget vacation tours. ("If its Tuesday, this must be Belgium";-an old movie). After a while everybody is smelly, standing in line for "Art 101" this kid has it down, it sucks, its awful, a day at the pool would have been more fun, screw this place.

A excellent picture, except for the weird filtering and manipulation which I feel makes it "less than".

I had a closer look at this image. The basic composition is allright but a huge section of the image to the lower R/H side is wasted by a black blob. Part of this darkness comes from the compression of the image on photo.net (Looking at the larger version of the image shows more detail). However, in Photoshop, a couple of keystrokes bring back the missing detail. My preference would be not to have such a huge section of non-relevant area in the image that requires manipulation into a black spot, and instead perhaps recompose the image in such a manner to give a feeling of more depth of field to the image without wasting so much space.

John: a great image.

Scuderia Ferrari. The Car itself is an Alfa Romeo.

I fully agree with your observation, however in this image please note the lack of detail in those areas with lots of illumination. And in photoshop when auto-levels are used, the software immediately attempts to darken the image. It could, perhaps, lie in issues with the scanning of the negative.

Dig the classic worn out Honda Smoke puff, rings are shot, mega-mileage.