jarred_mccaffrey2

Why the split color? The composition does evoke emotions, but I find the split color here to be distracting. Unless there is a _specific intent and reason_ to color objects in a black and white, to me the technique comes across as a cute attempt at best but more often simply cheesy. It's one of those things that was great the first time you saw it, but is really easy to overuse. Unless you feel strongly about your reasons why you colored the pillows (telling me might add to my appreciation--I always feel the "why?" of an image is far more important than the image itself), I would like to see either color or black and white here. I do like the emotions from this photo, however. I wonder about a tighter cropping or a different cropping--no opinion there, just I wonder.

Great capture of details. The shadows on the stretched leather add another dimension. The perspective is tight and fills the frame with important objects. There's a nice simplicity to this, though--it's just a hand, an instrument, a head, and a light source. The wrist appears unnaturally desaturated to me and a bit of the same feel occurs on the left side of the face. It's coming from the single warm light source I think. I find the difference in warmth between the fingertips and the wrist a bit disturbing. I'm a black and white person, so don't ask me exactly what happened here, but perhaps a second warm light would have helped so long as it didn't wash out those great silhouettes on the leather.

FYI: with my film scanner (a Nikon Coolscan IV), I find increasing the exposure by 1/2 stop can give additional highlight detail without blasting out my shadows. In the near future, I'd like to set up a work flow to combine multiple scans, but that's hard to do while maintaining accurate density relationships in the final image.

This reminds me of some other classic work I've seen. There's another "door image" in the current Lens Work magazine. Also, though I can't remember the photographer, I think I was shown something similar in my Documentary Image class recently.

 

Nice job as is. The photo has a wide range of exposure values which are tough to expose and capture and similarly difficult to print. That said, these images really start to kick when the viewer feels there is detail from the highlights through the deepest shadow. That's part of the appeal for platinum prints, etc.--the wide exposure range they can represent.

 

I would have liked to see just a bit more detail in your shadows, but those are close and maybe a matter of artistic judgement. The floor blasted out is too hot for me--it seems there should be some detail represented there. The lower vegetation has a pleasing level of detail that I would have liked to see in the upper vegetation. You might have more detail in your negative--can you manually adjust exposure in your film scanner assuming that's what was used?

 

This is very interesting to the eye. My complaints are primarily requests to push the medium a bit more.

Throw it all at me. I may or may not agree, but improvement is the

goal.

 

This is part of a series which uses transportation as a metaphore.

 

Thanks in advance.