richard van hoesel

Spectacular Nana. A wonderful narrative with many levels to explore and think about. Along with your finest imho.

I'm with Ian on this one, possibly even more so for 'Silent Night'. Lot's of strong additions to your portfolio...

Marc, I like all three of your recent uploads a lot. Although they are of quite different settings, all three do a wonderful job immersing the viewer in the scene. Wrt this one, waterfall images can be mundane if not handled well, but the dynamics and softness in this shot contrast quite spectacularly imho. Lovely work.

Easily my favourite of your last three portaying this scene Joe, and I think the composition works very nicely here. I oscillate between liking the high-contrast treatment and thinking the highlights in the sky look just a bit too harsh, although no doubt it will look more moderate in a print anyway. If not, you might also consider a minimal crop at the top.

Lovely shot - simple but engaging combination of angles, colours and textures. Have you considered cropping about 20% off the left side?

Not much to add Carl, other than my praise also for this lovely image. It's right up there with your best work imo. Like Leigh, it struck an oriental chord with me too - both in design and palette. I think the lower bar is essential to anchor the shot.

Leigh, I think this might actually be my favourite in the series now. The interaction between the reflections and scratches works very nicely here. The relative sparseness results in an almost Japanese aesthetic . Funny enough, despite this being very different from you seascape images, I still see ocean waves...

Yes, this one is by far the strongest in the series for me too Leigh. Those fringe reflections are just great. The only problem I have is that I keep wanting to tilt my head to the right. I might prefer the horizontal version, rotated 90deg anti-clockwise, even though that might reduce the dynamics and abstract nature of the shot somewhat.

Fabulous eyecatching image Jake. It seems a little too hot on my monitor, which could be taken care of with a simple curve adjustment with the midtones up a bit, but might look fine as is on a brighter monitor. The reflection is what indeed makes this image, and I might have liked a little more sky to compliment it, but that might also be my prefence for a squarer rectangle in general these days. Seems to need a small anticlockwise rotation too.

This is just great Nana - my favourite of what I've seen in this folder so far. Perfect composition and lots of wonderful lines for the eye to explore. The rich glowing tonality made me think it was LF.

Dexter - this has some odd colour casts like the magenta halos around the trees (perhaps from an auto levels' adjustment?). Composition looks balanced, but something to add interest in the sky (e.g.a moon) would have been nice.

Wonderful composition, timing and light Jake, particularly if this is after only 1 year of shooting. Although I agree the dark rock at the top is a minor distraction, I think trying to crop it out makes an alrady long format into an uncomfortably narrow shot, and cropping at the bottom to compensate loses that lovely foreground. You've done a great job preserving detail through most of the shot, although I might concur that the upper half could be 0.5-1 stop brighter for a slightly more natural balance. The adjustments you have made are to me not as unbelievable as alluded to in some of the above comments (and I've spent a bit of time along coasts). Keep up the great work.

Lovely shot indeed - the colours and selected DOF are quite spectacular. The only thing I might have preferred is a tiny bit more space between the tail and the edge of the frame.

I've heard about these falls but not seen many shots so it's nice to see what all the fuss is about - it's certainly a beautiful setting. My own preference would have been for a longer exposure (if possible) to smooth the water, but I know not everyone likes that effect.

Well worth the hike - great location. You might consider adjusting the curves for a little more contrast to the sky and upper part of the mountain, and the framing seems just marginally tight at the top, but it's still a nice scenic.

This is probably, my favourite in this folder. It looks like quite a difficult location to shoot, and this one has preserved more colour and texture in the surrounds. I think cropping a bit off the bottom, or even a perfect-square using just the top of the image might be worth a try too.

Marc G: "My verdict: a decent execution of a very poor vision."

 

Or maybe a poor execution of a decent vision?

 

Eric: "a seemingly large number of people really LOVE it the way it is - I think precisely because it is not very believable. "

 

I dont know if it is because it is unbelievable per se. It could just be without any directed consideration as to whether it?s realistic or not. Seasoned scrutinizers aside, others might more readily stretch the limits of their belief so as to better enjoy the ride (not unlike other convictions we might have), or else in deferral to the photographer?s expanded opportunities to experience the conditions depicted.

 

Lannie: Thanks.

seem to have lost my attachment on my last post...

I think most of us as photographers agree the result, as presented, is unconvincing of what a real scene could possibly look like. However, my view is that the in-camera technique is not as bad as some posts make out. With more work, I think a more believable portrayal of the scene can be recovered. Whether that's what Dave intends, only he can say.

Eric, yes but a rather noisy technology compared to the fine-grained positive films (and high end digitals) that are available, and probably used by many landscape photographers for that reason too.

I think many of us who try to shoot high contrast (10 stops or more), high colour scenes like these would love to be able to ditch those grads if our recording medium would only allow it. Once recorded, the photographer's artistic vision could then be fine-tuned using whatever postprocessing might be desired (or not). However, we are not at that stage with today's technologies and we usually have to live with something between 5-7 stops instead. Yes, you can take multiple exposures if the conditions allow it, but they don't always. Very long exposures for example taken after sundown (or before sun-up) will have different light in the two frames, and with moving objects like ocean waves even merging short exposures can be difficult. There is also something very satisfying about taking a shot in a single frame, as it lends itself to more readily maintain the willful illusion that a photograph can be an accurate representation of the scene. The same sentiment seems to be reflected in the requirement that for juried photo-competitions images are often required to be derived from a single exposure.

 

As far as Dave's POW, I would agree with some of the comments that the sky in this instance is probably too dark in comparison to the land, but that's something that can be adjusted. The dark mountains on the horizon aren't a problem for me - try (carefully) looking towards the sun next time you're watching a sunset and see how much detail you can see in more distant objects in that direction. The dark rock on the right is more distracting, but seems to have enough detail that it could be could be brought up to a satisfactory level. Maybe a different grad would have been better, maybe not, but having much more of the area around the sun blown out would certainly have been a much bigger problem. In summary, I don't think the approach taken was problematic enough problem to warrant the heavy-handed criticism it has received from some, and the positive aspects like that great foreground and colour contrast between the land and water, with a few simple adjustments certainly make this a keeper for me.

 

On a more general note, I always find it puzzling that some consider the use of uncoloured ND filters as an excecssive modification of the scene, but have no problem with for example the selective burning and dodging that often goes into producing an optimal print, or with the use of coloured filters in black and white photography. It's equally puzzling to me that high saturation displays are described as unnatural looking, but black and white prints are not.

 

The discussion raised about images like this not falling in the 'high value' category is interesting, but confounded by marketing issues unrelated to image quality. I'm also not convinced that some photographers, who object to the featureless dark regions in an image like this, would be any more satisfied assigning it 'artistic' credibility if the technology were available to record the full dynamic range, since a colourful sunset (natural or otherwise) appears to be an automatically disqualifying component for some. Finally, how 'good' the image is, for me has little to do with what Dave is trying to achieve. When I see an image, the experience is quite divorced from the photographer's intentions and aspirations.

Leigh, yes seeing a larger version of this one sells it to me too. The only room for improvement that I see lies with the darker region on the right. I wonder if lifting those levels a little is worth experimenting with? It also seems slighlty tight between that area and the rocks out in the water. It looks like you're already shooting from a fair way up, so I'm guessing a higher vantage point might not have been an option. Interestingly, the tension disappears when I crop about a third of the foreground (which results in a comp that is closer to a thirds in my view), but the cost of losing the nice glow there is probably a bit too high. All minor points though - it's still a wonderful shot, and easily one of my favourites of your more recent works.

These shots are fabulous Marcus, probably the most beautiful fireworks images I've ever seen. I think this one's my favourite of the ones you've posted. In an ideal world, it might have been preferable to have a little more of the frame at the bottom, but I appreciate the procarious nature of composing with this technique.

Atle, this is certainly a nice shot with some lovely lines but I too agree it needs that little more at the bottom for balance. I can't believe the lab decided to just crop part of the frame without your instructions to do so. Even if they are not a pro lab I would expect a free rescan, as this is their mistake.

Congrats Leigh. 'Looking back' at this image now, it seems more agressive than the style you presently seem to be persuing, but I still think it is one of your strongest works. The range of light incorporated by using the ultrawide lens again strikes me as amazing, as it did when I first saw this a few years ago. While I probably agree from what I see on my monitor that moderating the saturation in the blue sky slighlty might better balance the rest of the image, I expect it will really take an iteration or two in prints to get it just right. The centred rock works fine for me too, perhaps because (as some have pointed out) it is in itself not that interesting. That leaves plenty of opportunity for the eye to explore the elements that encircle it instead. In fact in that regard, stepping closer to it would probably have weakened the image.

 

I guess it's not unexpected that without some sense of connection to the beauty of the natural world around us, some people don't see the landscape as offering much in the way of content. For me however this is a fine example of this being very untrue. In contrast to the "happy ending" (sun after the storm) impression mentioned, this one evokes a strong sense of fleetingness and urgency with me.

 

A few have expressed a concern that the 3-stop grad is objectionable. However, short of perhaps using a reverse grad, I think there was no better alternative here. Shooting without grads in a situation like this, at least until we have a medium that can handle 8-10 stops, is total nonsense and gets results that look much less like what the human eye sees, not more. Finally, while there is clearly some effect of film and scanning here, I'd recommend to anyone who outright objects that deeply saturated colours are unnatural spend a few dozen sunrises or sunsets along a smog-free coast first :)