dem_photos

Liz: The really strange thing about that rating was that I posted this photo for critique only, so it shouldn't have received ANY ratings. I'm glad YOU like it, anyway. Thanks for visiting!

Hi Ellen,

 

Were you aware that you have an admirer/imitator at Photographers Direct?

 

http://www.photographersdirect.com/buyers/stockphoto.asp?imageid=1459993&userid=28333

 

Or is that your photo? That photo received their highest rating, and yours are at least as good, so if you're not already posting photos there, you might want to think about it.

 

David

Marc G.: Good question. I'll take a stab at an answer. The human face is symmetrical, so seeing half a face allows us to interpolate what the whole face looks like. In the photos you've posted, the shadows on the faces leave a full half of each face unobstructed (in one, part of the face is hidden behind a jacket collar, but that's another matter altogether). The shadow of the nose in the POW, however, covers a good portion of the only visible side of the subject's face, leaving us no information to finish our mental picture of what her full face looks like. Plus, I suspect the shadow does make her nose look larger than it really is, which is generally unflattering (and I speak with the authority of a guy with a really big nose).

A literally brilliant photo, Sondra. I'm trying to figure out why the slight lean in the aspens doesn't bother me a bit. Part of the reason, I think, is all those vertical evergreens in the background and the strong horizontal of the shore. Perhaps the leaning aspens provide a comfortable contrast to such a stable grid. Or perhaps I'm just full of it. Whatever the reason, I do love the photo.

Ruud: Thanks for visiting and rating.

 

Sondra: Ha! This flower (Lamium or Lamiastrum, I'm not sure which) is in the mint family, a group of plants once named for the mouth-like "lips" of their flowers (they used to be the Labiatae, "labia" being "lips," of course, but someplace along the way the name of the family seems to have changed to Lamiaceae). Even knowing all this plant taxonomy, though, I didn't notice the Little-Shop-of-Horrors attitude on this flower until you pointed it out!

Great tones, Saro. You captured just the right moment with marvelous depth and effect. My only complaint: I'm not sure why the sky seems to glow where it meets the buildings, but I find the effect distracting.

Great shutter speed--fast enough to freeze your subject, but slow enough to allow a little motion blurring in the pigeons.

Thank you, Pavel, J.K., and Rosario. Glad you like the photo.

In spite of appearances, this bee is leaving the flower, not arriving

(they seem to be easier to catch on their way out). The background is

as the camera captured it. My only non-PN sanctioned adjustment to

this photo was to reduce the glare a bit on the flower--perhaps it's

still a little harsh? Comments are always welcome.

Wonderful portrait, Jody.

 

Diana: Unless Jody says otherwise, I suspect the "pupil" effect is a result of the reflection of a macro ring light in the spider's eyes.

Very interesting shot. I agree with J. Knight that the blown out light on the left is a distraction, but I do like this one better than the other one you posted. The two seem to be taken from identical (or nearly identical) positions, so you could conceivably take areas at the left from the second photo and put them into this photo, if you don't object to such manipulation. It might create the illustion that the car is glowing with its own internal light.

That's an interesting observation Jean-Baptiste. Although there are ways to imply motion with photography, photos most often freeze motion, and if the beauty of a subject lies in its motion, that aspect of its beauty will probably be diminished in a photo. On the other hand, my zoom lens did allow me to view this subject closer than I could have managed with the naked eye. Perhaps a film at this magnification would be best of all.

I suspect at least part of the manipulated/unmanipulated questioning that arose was because it was easier for many of us to imagine creating this image in PS than actually going through all the work you did!

 

You wrote: "Stopping down a lens to F:16 or F:20 is also a very bad idea: ALL the dusty ?details? from the optical path will painfully come up as details on the image. :-|" Many of the photos you posted DO show what looks to me like dust on the sensor (note the upper right corners in particular). If you haven't already done so, cleaning your sensor might clear up some of this trouble.

Here's my explanation in a little more detail. Imagine a reflector mounted on a stem that holds it a few inches away from the train. With the light coming at a sharp angle from the left, the reflector enters the shadow before the area of the train behind it does, so it blinks out while the part of the train around it is still reflecting light toward the camera. Then it briefly comes into and leaves the light between the woman's legs (this is your cue, Sylvie and Knicki?!?) while the area of the train behind it is still in shadow, and finally comes back into the light ahead of the area behind it.

 

What I don't like about this theory is that it seems dangerous to have something sticking out from the train like that (even if the train bends under down there). But I do believe a reflector mounted at an angle to the train would leave a similar trace.

Excellent observation about the lines over the shadows! It seems to be a curious thing to overlook when making a PS manipulation, though. I suspect this is due instead to a reflective object mounted to the train either at an angle (so that it reflects light at a different angle from other points on the train) or on a stem of some sort that holds it a few inches away from the train (so that it catches the light at a different time from other parts of the train). If so, I think the bottom white line (where the effect is most obvious) shows us exactly how far the train moved during this exposure.

Neutral density filter, long exposure, flash--this photo was no accident! The beautiful composition makes that clear enough, of course, but what I like best about this photo is that all the technical stuff is essentially invisible: There's nothing to get between the person looking at the photo and an intriguing vision that I'm sure will be interpreted a thousand different ways.

One of the first things I noticed about this photo was that the composition is a little off. This immediately registered in the rule-following part of my brain as a violation of a "rule" I think Mathieu Landry expressed very well. I like to think of it as "Just a little off center is probably the worst place for a subject." Of course, the rule-breaking part of my brain insists on inserting "probably" in the rule, and when I try to look beyond following or breaking the rules, I find that the slightly off composition actually doesn't bother me in this case. Perhaps having the center of the architecture a little right while the subject is a little left results in relaxed sort of balance.

 

That said, when I came across Carl Root's crop, I felt an "Aaaahhhh" of relief. The original composition may be more interesting in a can-I-get-away-with-this sort of way, but I personally feel much more comfortable looking at Carl's version. Of course, "comfort" isn't necessarily the primary goal for a photographer, but it's worth noting that had I come across Carl's version first, my gut reaction would not have been to question the composition, and my mind would have been free to contemplate what I consider a more interesting question posed by this photo: Where the heck do they put the art in this space?

Really? My gut reaction was "Blechchcch!" This is the same lamb in the photo titled "Miracle of Birth," which I took right at the moment of birth (I determined the lamb's age by the difference in time taken in the photos' exif info). It took a couple of minutes for Mom to realize she had a second lamb, but when she did, she started eating all that gunk off of it. I felt simultaneously honored to be a witness to this event and nauseated.

Glad you like this, Ellen. It probably isn't very clear, but the younger lamb here is the older sibling to the lamb in "All of six minutes old" and "Miracle of birth." The mother was working away madly licking off all the orange gunk (the technical term) they were born with, and I spoiled a lot of shots by not bumping up the ISO to get a faster shutter speed (there's some motion blurring visible in the lamb's head in this shot). Oh well, lesson learned. NEXT time I happen to be passing my neighbor's barn at the moment a sheep is giving birth, I won't make the same mistake.

Thank you for your comments Iren and Dimf. Iren, you are correct: This spider was washed but not dried. Actually, I found it in the sink next to the washer, apparently unable to climb up the smooth sides to escape. It must have been there a long time, because it seemed to be weak, presumably from hunger, and I believe most spiders can go a loooong time without eating. Then again, perhaps it considered posing for a photo session to be repayment for rescuing it from the sink. In any case, it was a very cooperative model, and I released it outside afterwards to hunt moles and small squirrels. [i'm sure there's a funny punctuation thing I should put here to indicate that I'm kidding, this spider wasn't actually large enough to hunt small mammals, but I don't know what it is.]

 

Dimf: Yes, those are eyes, and I learned in trying to identify this spider that the positions of the eyes are an important clue. It used to be that you had to kill spiders and insects to see this sort of detail and get an accurate identification, but with advances in macro photography, I think it's easier now to make an identification without damage to your karma.

D.L.: Thanks for visiting and commenting. I lit this with a Photek Softliter, which is basically an umbrella to which you can attach a diffuser for extra-soft light. Usually it creates umbrella-shaped catchlights, but the angle must have been wrong in this particular setup. I originally thought about titling this "Catchlights? We don't need no steenkin' catchlights!" but then thought better of it.

Thanks for visiting and rating this photo, Rabinder. Glad you like it.

Can't get enough of them, myself. As always, comments are most welcome.

The photo I posted was below my original post before, I swear it was! Now it's above, but I cannot guarantee that it will remain there. All I can say now is that the photo nearest my original post is the best possible crop, as determined by science.

I can never figure out where a photo will appear (above or below) when I attach it. I should have said "below" above, when I referred to the above photo, because it wound up below, not above, my post. Sorry for any confusion.