bruce wilson

Here I've shot Skyline Arch in Arches National Park with a foreground

juniper. But the perspective makes the juniper apear larger than the

arch, which is itself massive. Have I committed a great "landscape

sin" by playing with relative sizes this much?

Could you please add the ability to filter out certain posters from the POW comments? I've developed a list of members who babble incessantly about things having nothing to do with the photograph, and I'd like to read the comments uncluttered by their 'contributions'.

 

Thank you.

 

P.S. If this is not possible, could you place the member's name at the beginning of the text block so I know how to treat what follows?

 

P.P.S. I wish I understood B&W better. There are some atmospheric/moody aspects to this shot I quite like, that would be difficuly to duplicate in color, but I also miss the color contrasts that are typically present in staged lighting. I'd like to have seen a color rendition of the same scene, side by side, to see the differences. It's is an unfortunate habit of mine to look at a B&W shot and wonder what it originally looked like.

Great shot, good time of day for it, too. I've been trying to get a sense of scale here, to figure out how tall the falls are, but can't get a good grasp. The green hills in the background make it look huge, but the flowers and grass on the bottom and left-hand side make it seem small because there is no 'distance' between them and the falls. Sure is a pretty place.

That's a neat shot. You can see more in the reflection that you can looking at the lights. I'm not sure that the composition (the use placement of light and dark areas) is the best, but I can't find anything specifically wrong with it, nor can I suggest a better way, it just isn't grabbing me much. Maybe the sweeping shadow on the foreground lawn is distancing me a bit.

The scan isn't so hot, blurry, too saturated. Nice shot, good isolation of each tree.

I like the detail in the wing. Shutter speed is difficult with a shot like this, becasue while it's nice to capture the moving wingtips, it's not good to have the head of the bird blurred by motion.

 

The head and wing overlap confuses the lines of the head and neck, which already have a low contrast problem.

 

But the moment of action is perfect, framing is very good (the wingtip out of frame is okay with me as long as the other is visible).

Nice study of textures. Good handling of exposure and contrast range. A small adjustment in framing (give the left-hand loop a little room to breathe) would improve this already good shot.

Why is the rock so white? Lose the con trail and tall pine in front of the subject.

Now those are some interesting wave patterns, especially the curved ones. Looks like there is some Moire in the scan. Can you rescan it at a higher resoluton to fix it?

Kinda cool older look about the shot. The thinness of the shot (low contrast, slight overexposure) adds to that. Nice building, too.

Lilac and green, not a combination I recall ever seeing. Nice shot, and the colors are almost believably natural.

I am not a believer in colored filters, but I think an orange one might really help this shot. The birds ar too far away and blending into thier own shadows to hold my interest. But as a highlight to a beautiful sunset shot they might work very nicely.

 

Scan looks a bit fuzzy, though. Maybe the shot is out of focus. I imagine you didn't have much time to check your depth of field and get your camera on a tripod.

Framing is a bit tight for my liking. The reflections on the leaf are nice, exposure caught them fine.

Polarizer, polarizer, polarizer! It would really help the colors and trextures in the scene. Also, the background on shots like this are best kept as uniform as possible, but here there are two plants with very different shapes that distracts from the subject. The position of the red leaf doesn't do anything for me, perhaps in the upper part of the frame, and a little more towards the left edge.

A tough-to-get shot, showing the softness of the water through all that bramble. Color helps a lot in sorting things out, and highlighting the subject. But the large branch at the bottom is just too much in the way.

Boy, this one's a leaner. Scenics form hillsides are tough to do unless tyou have some vertical or horizontal reference for the viewer to orient himself. Here the foreground grass and flowers are leaning out, rather making me want to lean with them. I suppose if you had included some major element that sloped the opposite directon we'd be able to find some balance. That dark little hill on the left doesn't do it.

 

Also, the shots needs a stronger foreground subject. Flowers do nicely, but they are too near the frame egde to serve that purpose, and we are left looking at the dark undergrowth, which I don't find very interesting.

This shot doesn't work for me. I like reflection shots because of the 'imaginary' quality they give to scenics. But here there is too much pavement getting in the way, as if you are saying something using the juxtaposition of earth and sky. Problem is, I can't tell just what you are saying, so it doesn't work for me.

Clouds are a nice touch here, which along with the tight shot doesn't make the bridge seem quite as light ans airy as most bridge shots do, but more monumental and heavy.

This shot looks better in the largest size. Beach is interesting, but the sunset is rather colorless.

Snapshot?

 

Scan is blurry and oversaturated.

 

Must have been nice to be on the beach that day, but I'm afraid this picture doesn't convey what you meant. The spectator in the bottom is distracting and should be cropped out.

http://www.photo.net/gallery/photocritique/standards/

 

Neat shot. Like someone said above, I don't know if this is photoshop or not, but it surely is an eye-grabbing relfection.

First, I think this is a wonderful picture, quite above the pedestrian photograph some make it out to be. I've been shooting about three years, and I'd be thrilled to turn out something this expressive.

 

Concerning ratings: I know nothing of grade-inflating groups, but I suspected they could exist (though not in Julia's case; today is the first day I've looked at here stuff and have formed no opinion about how the rating came to be). But I am convinced there is some rampant grade inflation going on by most of the casual visitors here, and some of the veterans. When I look at most photographs and thier ratings it seems to me there is about a four point disparity, based on this website's rating standards (at http://www.photo.net/gallery/photocritique/standards). When I first started rating photographs I read this carefully, and applied it as conscientiously as I could. I found that my ratings were consistantly below the average when I rated all photographs in the photocritique system (now I only rate photos where I make comments, hoping to contribute more than a number as feedback to the photographer). I felt the effects of grade inflation most accutely when I was harassed by email for giving a rating below average for what looked to me like a snapshot and blew the photographer's chance at a top 10 spot (he later reposted the shot hoping to get a higher average without my participation).

 

I gave this shot an 8/8, because I think it is very, very good. That's an 8/8 using the Standards, not the norm. By the norm this would be a 12/12 or so. I like it because of what the light is doing with the ground. I've seen nothing like it in the past, and it's a very appealing effect. I also think the B&W appearance of the ground is nicely offset by the red behind it. This shot would have gotten a 9/8 or a 9/9 had I felt there was a little more compositional balance between those two elements, but the ground is a bit too dominant and the red building is too near the edge of the frame to compliment the moody feeling of the shot.

 

Just so you know, I'm saving my 10/10 for a picture of God. Let me know if anyone gets it.

Thanks to both of you for your comments. I think the dark cloud is a problem, but I wanted to get the lamp in for completelness. This was my fifth visit to the place (I have so far shot about 10 4x5's of this with worse lighting), and it seems at least one more will be needed. There are a bunch of (feral) cats living in this place that hang out in front, and I still haven't managed to get the shot with them in it. The camera position is in the middel of the road, and my moving for traffic always scares them away.

Wondering if a falls shot from the side can be as effective as falls

shot straight-on. Trouble is, it's very difficult getting to the

other side of this canyon with lerge-format cameras, so I didn't.

Just stood on the boardwalk and shot. I tried to use light to add a

dynamic element to the scene.

I like this. Sure it's cliched, but still looks good. Exposure came out okay, and the colors give the impression of heat, much heat. Naming it sunrise rather than sunset diminishes from the impact of heat.