benjamin.portraiture

I don't think it's really obvious at these sizes.

 

I like the pic. Did you replace the moon with one of equivalent size (I'm guessing you did). If I were going to replace it anyway, I might have opted for a larger, more dramatic size although this probably looks more natural given its height above the horizon.

I love the diversity of the state of Arizona. Where else can you take

a photo of craggy, snow topped peaks while standing next to Saguaros

in summer gear?

Taken in an abandoned house with no roof on a partly cloudy day.

When I saw the thumbnail I supposed I was looking at an old toilet paper holder in an outhouse. I like the texture of the wood and the way the light brings out the patina of the rust on the metal to the left of the picture. I wish it did the same on the right as that side just looks kind of flat.

 

I like it overall though.

I'm not sure I'd make the Condor the subject here. There's just not enough detail and it almost seems that the Condor is detracting from the landscape rather than being the focal point. I know I've got ton's of "bird in flight" shots that I had high hopes for (no pun intended), but they're generally not sharp enough or the bird is not turned the right way, etc. If this were a tighter shot with more detail it'd be great - especially when you consider you'd have been looking straight across from this vantage point.

Let me know your views. How does this work (or not) compositionally or

technically (or any other 'ally' you might choose)?

That's Pluto, not Goofy.

There are just a couple of things I would do differently (which doesn't necessarily make them "right"). The sheet music to the right seems too bright to me. I'd try to darken it up a bit. Then there are the two spots where we see neither sheet music nor guitar. At the bottom it looks like carpet or something and in the cutout by the neck I can't quite make out what's going on there but it's enough to distract me from the main composition. I'd either arrange more sheet music to cover areas behind the guitar or recrop at least the bottom and darken the area behind the cutout a bit.

 

Depending on the color of the guitar, this might work better in color than B&W.

Most macros are pretty static (oooh, pretty flower), including my own. I like this one because it's full of drama. The only thing I'd like to see is either to pull back a bit and increase depth of field to capture more of the action, or to go in tighter by cropping out some of the green in the lower right.

I like the way you used depth of field to blur the background and make the snake (and his breakfast) the focal point. Pity you didn't catch the tip of the lizard's tail in the frame though.

The shot was taken while visiting my kids. I live in Arizona and this was in N. Carolina (a three day drive if you're willing to spend 18 hours on the road each of those days...).

 

I was originally getting some shots of the patina on the tombstones that surround this old church. When I rounded the corner I saw the daycare playground. I've got some better shots of the foremost tombstone exposed for the shadows, but getting them both just washed out the playground equipment (maybe if I sandwich the two together).

 

I really wasn't bothered by the lack of children on the playground since I couldn't see the dead people either.....

...where your daughter gets those captivating eyes.

 

I don't have a problem with the lighting at all. Any lighter and the highlights in the underside of the hood will be blown out. Nice, even lighting in the skin tones. Nicely cropped. You might consider cropping so that the blown out sky is eliminated which would also take your face out of dead center and move it to the left a bit or just fill the frame with nothing but face.

From an aesthetic point of view I thought "Learning to Knit" was a better composition than this one. With this shot the highlights are better, but the one place where you have a total blowout is in the smile which, according to the title, is what you found most striking about the image. Could stand to be darker so that the detail isn't lost there as I think there's enough light to keep the rest of the face illuminated. Try adjusting higlights down using levels if you haven't already (that'll also drop your midtones a bit, but you can bring them back up after dropping the highlights). I'd do that in an adjustment layer so that you can come back and change it later without losing data after a save.

While ratings are fine, I'd rather know what you think of the image

itself. It's nice to know that it floats your boat (or sinks it) but I

want to know why you do or don't like it. Comments about what works or

doesn't work aesthetically and/or technically. Thanks in advance.

I actually did crop quite a bit on both the right and the bottom but was reluctant to do more since I'd lose so much of the initial doorway - especially if I cut the window. I'll tinker with it some more though and see what it looks like.

 

I appreciate the comments.

Nina,

 

I don't think anything is as arresting in a photograph as when the eyes engage the camera as your daughter's have here. The fact that you didn't plan to be a part of the picture by being reflected in the eyes is one of those serendipitous gifts. The title indicates a twofold recognition of what's going on in the picture - the viewer getting lost in those huge eyes (almost lemur-like they're so big) and the photographer's own image being captured by the eyes as the portrait was captured in the camera.

 

I'll have to mosey on over to take a look at the rest of your work now.

I like the rust and weathered wood but the tree detracts from the picture. It's not really used as a framing element, it just blocks the cab of the truck. I don't know if the other side would have given a clearer shot of more of the truck or not. I'm guessing by looking at the nature of the snow on this side that it is the side sheltered from the sun and possibly there's less snow piled up on the other side (although the even layer across the width of the cab suggests otherwise).

 

Barring a better angle I'd go in close and grab some detail. Does that look like a skull in the rust between the wheelwell and the taillight?

Sorry Peter,

 

What drew me to this discussion in the first place was seeing your (insert preferred noun describing "Paul") among many that had been rated and commented on by certain of the "top" (whatever that may mean) commentators on the site here.

 

For what it's worth, I liked the composition and I clicked on it before viewing a lot of the others. However, I must say that I thought the "pimp hat" comments were based on the supposed "red" color of the hat which I thought was really a brown fedora with warm light (or filtration) making it look a bit reddish.

 

In short. Your image caught my eye and drew me in.

To the esteemed Mr. Dummett (et al):

 

I read your musical analogy with interest, but it seems you've never been to a "Pops" concert where Strads and Yamahas and Peavys and flat tops and tympani and trap sets all work together harmoniously and the "serious" musicians don't look down on the Claptons but enjoy their work.

 

You and I are pretty close in age and I too started with film. The difference I think is that I've always seen myself capturing "images". Whether I do so to film or to digital media seems irrelevant. Light still bounces off that which is "real", travels through the lens and is captured either in a layered emulsion or in discrete values of ones and zeros. What we "capture" are images of the reality, not the reality itself (well, there was that one time when I captured a young lady with my camera strap, but I had to let her go).

 

As long as what is done in Photoshop is analagous to a wet darkroom process I don't see a problem. I'm sure you'd agree that there are images that have been processed more traditionally that have just been fiddled with (to carry on with your Strad analogy I suppose) too much to be considered more photographic than some images that were digitally captured (by scanning a slide perhaps) and posted as-is without manipulation of any sort.

 

What I see in this discussion is more like an artist taking another to task because they used masonite rather than canvas and acrylics rather than oils. Give me a stand-out medium format camera with a killer lens and rock-solid tripod and I'll likely take better pictures in one respect because I'm using better equipment. But my composition isn't likely to improve even a smidgen and I may not know how to take full advantage of the technology in newer film-based cameras while the lens is going to be as sharp as it can be barring just not getting the thing focused or hand-holding after my body gets too weak to hold steady through the exposure.

 

Have you seen the Pepsi commercial where the simple choice of softdrinks leads a young Jimi Hendrix to a guitar rather than an accordion? I think it's funny, but do you really think the kid would have chosen to be an acid trippin' polka king if he'd have had a Coke instead?

 

In short, I think Da Vinci would have embraced the use of computers to get from point A to point B more efficiently while holding on to traditional things for certain aesthetic qualities the technology just didn't allow him to evoke.... yet.

 

I still enjoy my pen-and-inks and there's a sense of reward when finishing a picture that is, in many ways, superior to what I feel when I capture a good shot in-camera (whether digital or film). I suppose that's the Blood, Sweat and Tears factor at work. But all the same I'm having a ball learning to use the computer to fine tune what I was able to capture in-camera and I feel no sense of shame in calling the prints that roll off my Epson printer "photos" or "images". When I listen to some of the comments here I feel like I'm supposed to be ashamed of my work simply "because" it's digital.

I think your knockoff of the PoW is funny. Your "added" black isn't as dark as the black on the right half. Did you add some red to the hat to evoke the same visceral response that "Paul's" hat got? By the way, I thought his hat was just brown and looked reddish because it had been warmed up and/or the face desaturated.

Who could resist a series of arched doorways? Well, not me.

 

We were visiting historical Fort Macon in NC. I didn't quite have the camera properly vertical for this shot and the wide angle caused some distortion. I had considered tinkering with it to line everything up but thought better of it as I reflected on history. We have a tendency to want everything to line up just right, but it doesn't always happen that way. Sometimes there's some distortion or things lean a little to one side or another when we would prefer that they didn't.

 

It's the same with our history. It's been said that history is skewed if for no other reason than the fact that it's written from the perspective of the victors. There are some who would like to go back and fix the parts that are askew in the interest of accuracy and I'm not faulting that. There are others, however, who would go back and "fix" history so that it lines up with their own sense of what it should look like - rewriting it like a compulsive straightens items on a table until they're "perfect".

 

I decided to leave it alone. There's a bit of distortion, but the image still - for the most part - shows things as I saw them when I was there.

This is a shot of a friend of mine as she looked for shells along a NC shoreline. The original had more sand in the foreground and more wave action to the right. I cropped it since more blurred foreground did nothing for the composition and I liked the sense of her stepping gingerly into the center of the composition more than I liked the additional wave action.

 

I thought about cropping out the bouy, but it would have left her either dead center or stepping out of the picture rather than into it. I think it adds an interesting counterbalance that is not compositionally strong enough to detract from the subject.

I saw this weird juxtaposition of gravestones and a daycare playground with nothing to divide them. The gravestones were in the darker shade of the large tree while the playground equipment was in diffused sunlight.

 

A couple of thoughts crossed my mind as I snapped a few shots. The scene could be viewed as a "circle of life" kind of metaphor with birth and death represented, but I quickly brushed that aside as the playground equipment isn't really used by newborns and death is not necessarily the end result of a long life.

 

It was the lack of a fence or wall dividing the two that really made it stand out to me - that death is not a respecter of some boundary associated with age at all, but that it can come for us at any stage in our lives. None of us have a promissory note that assures us a tomorrow.

 

Get out on the playground and enjoy whatever life we may have left while keeping the end in view, knowing that it is without boundaries and we are scarcely separated from it by the merest of breaths.

OK. I reloaded the photo at a more reasonable size. My earlier request

was for constructive criticism from both aesthetic and technical

points of view (aside from the unfortunate positioning of the pipe). I

might point out that the finished print that I gave my friends had

three insets - one in the lower part of the reeds, one in the water

that conveniently covered the pipe and one a little higher up that hid

most of the building. These were three shots I had taken of them

earlier in the evening.

It might be more instructive to leave the original at the top of the page and dropping in examples of changes suggested below in the flow of comments.

 

I like the picture, but it may be more that I'm drawn to this girl's facial features in both this shot and "The Rose". I think it'd be hard to get a bad shot with that expressive face in it.

 

Background here seems far less problematic than in "The Rose" as well.