jpatokal

The cover here may look familiar...

http://www.buhv.de/kirche/Liturgie-fuer-Wochentage-und-besondere-Anlaesse.html

I like this picture a lot, but am not entirely sure why: it's tilted,

not symmetric and doesn't slavishly follow the rule of thirds, but to

me it still feels very harmonious. Any analysis would be welcome.

Very nice and crisp -- how long was the exposure? But the picture does indeed seem a little tilted, and there's also some vignetting at the top corners.

I have a version of this image taken from a slightly different angle

href="http://jpatokal.iki.fi/photo/travel/Singapore/Bugis/Shophouse_Staircases2_Eq.JPG">here

.

Which one is better? Personally, I can't quite decide if I should

favor the greater symmetry of the alternate version, or the better

color range, slight gap and bizarre cloudpuff of this one.

Impossibly sharp -- how on earth did you get this amazing shot?

These are statues of the boddhisattva Jizô (Ksitigarbha), regarded in Japan as the protector of children. These small, babylike statues in particular are purchased by parents to commemmorate children who have died young. You took this at Hasedera Temple, right?

Photographically, the concept is promising, but I have to agree that the unfocused front row is distracting.

Very nice idea, I thought the salt was snow at first! The scene looks like it could be straight out of the 19th century. Alas, the corner vignetting and unfocused shrubs in the foreground are rather distracting; I would be tempted to crop this into a square, cutting off both edges and curing both problems.

Feels somewhat off-balance; the animal's left leg is partly cut off. How about cropping it into a square...?

Excellent lighting in tough conditions. Well composed, although I'm not sure Venus and the branch on the left add to it.

Whoah nelly, let's take a breather here. The only authoritative source on what photo.net ratings mean is Philip's tutorial, and you'll note that there are a whole bunch of 10's handed out in there, many of them rather liberally even by my standards. But the tutorial defines the two criteria simply as: "Give a picture a high rating for aesthetics if you like the way it looks", and "Give a photo a high rating for originality if it shows you something unexpected." Nothing more, and if you try to claim anything else, you're making it up!

Now, as for how I personally rate images, a "10" for aesthetics means that I see no way of improving the picture and a "10" for originality means that I have never seen anything like it before (and I like it!). To date, preciselyoneimage has managed to score full points on both at the same time. Is it the greatest picture that there ever has been or will be? No, but it's a damned good picture, and that's good enough for me.

Technically, it's a marvelous photo, but is itbeautiful? At least to my eye, the green lightlooks quite frankly horrible, and the fact that it is "natural" light, as opposed to the photoshopped kind, doesn't really excuse this. If I were the photographer, I would probably have attempted to tone down the effect of the camp lights, withdigital postprocessing if necessary.

And I agree that the tree on the right is rather distracting, the trunk is much too bright and it draws the eye away from the "moonburst".

Update: I took a second look on my home computer, and suddenly the picture's colors seem much better.Ah, the joys of gamma... but I still don't like the second tree.

 

Starting with 5/5, point deductions for:

the big honking light pole bisecting the

picture and reflecting light

total lack of detail in the upper half

totally irrelevant detail in the lower half

(the central doorway is almost excusable, but

why include the lit building on the left?)

starry sky reduced to a bunch of dust specks

half the church missing (what's the white thingy below it?)

the visible part off-center and too small to be interesting

 

...leaving us with -1/-1. but on the plus side,

the picture seems pretty sharp despite a 16

second exposure so I'll nudge that up to 1/1.

I would suggest following your own advice:

That is one seriously creepy-looking tree --

it seems hard to believe it's not computer

generated. Full points for managing to capture it this well!

Excellent picture, the colors are fantastic

and the focus is perfect, The only flaw is

that the top of his/her hair is cut off...

I've been following the discussion withinterest, but I find I have to take exceptionto that not "real" photography bit.Yes, I saw the quotes and I know you're notbeing entirely serious, but still...I'm a digital fundamentalist, so I can't pickand choose my films: my camera captures 1600x1200full-color, period. Any predefined filters inmy camera (B&W, sepia, ISO 100/200/400, etc)are digital effects added on after the pictureis taken, identically to Photoshop.. except that PS (or actually Gimp ,which I use these days after my conversion to the Linux religion, but don't like as much) probably does a better job.Still, is there really any fundamentaldifference between a film photographer choosinga B&W film and intentionally overexposing itwhile developing by hand, and a digitalphotographer selecting Desaturate and Contrast/Brightness in Photoshop?

A few people have suggested that the picturemight be better in B&W instead of sepia.Well, see for yourselves, just download thepicture and desaturate it again. The sepiatoning was done with Preserve Luminosity soit should come out more or less intact.I occasionally use plain B&W for pictures ofintrinsically beautiful objects, esp. people,but here I was aiming for the "pre-WW2" ageeffect and I think the (hand-toned) reddishsepia looks very nice on the old planks, whichare after all the background of most of the picture. Your mileage may vary.

As for extending the picture, the manipulationwas quite well done, but as you're adding something that wasn't there originally, it goes out of therealm of photography into something different.I certainly wasn't offended by it, in fact itwas fascinating to see how the picture wouldhave looked with the wheel intact... and I wassurprised to find that I still like the original better.

Incidentally, I'm a he, not a she. These funnyFinnish names confuse quite a few people, butJani is essentially the Finnish version ofJohnny.

Carry on, carry on... =)

Maybe I'd better say a few words about the situationbehind the photo. First of all, buildings like the onein the picture are a rapidly dying breed, few woodenbuildings survived the firebombings of WW2 and new onesare no longer built due to the fire hazard, the exorbitantcost of Japanese wood, and their comparative lack ofcomfort in these days of air conditioning and electricalheating. I've lived in Tokyo for 4 years and I knowof perhaps ten poor, working-class wooden buildings like the one in the picture, scattered all over town, andevery few months one of them is torn down. Romanticism aside, you'd be hard pressed tocall these rickety shacks beautiful, but they areevocative and they appeal to what us Westerners thinkJapan should look like, as opposed to what it has become.As a reader correctly noted, the picture looks just uglyin full color (since 50 years ago a moldy wooden shack withtwo old bikes leaning against it would have been ugly!),but sepia-toned B&W allows us tosuspend our disbelief and think of it as a picture fromdays long gone.

So. It was indeed late afternoon on a cloudless day,the sun was setting behind the building and I was standing inits shadow, trying to take a picture facing the sun -- always a bad move, but I had no choice. This is why the sky is cropped out, and this is also why those white signsare glowing, they're catching reflected light fromsomewhere. Still,while I have no problems with cropping and reshadingfull pictures, I very rarely actually edit detailsand that's why I didn't touch the signs.The reflection behind the bicycle's saddle is from a windowin a modern building on the other side of the alley.

The bike wheel being cut off is indeed a mistake:the alley was narrow so backing up a few feet was not anoption, but I could probably have croucheddown a few more inches. Another thing that I don'tlike is that the dimmer sign behind the bright signsproclaims "Karaoke" in a modern Japanese typeface, theonly legible word in the picture and a bit of an anachronism... and if you look very carefully you canalso spot the odd plastic bottle in there.

Just for yucks, I put up a picture of the samebicycles in the same alleyway, but with much worsecomposition and no post-processing. Can you even recognizeit as the same scene?

As it happens, I live very close to that building, andI pass it twice a day on my way to and from work.Maybe I'll give it another shot someday...

Photo of the Week, eh? I'm honored;I did think it was a nice picture, but notquite that nice. I suspect mycomment on theExterior Architecture tutorialand Philip's recent visit to Tokyo may havesomething to do with the selection. =)But maybe this willdo a bit to quiet all those people who thinkthat digital is just a toy and that Real Menonly take pictures with Nikon SLRsand $5000 lenses...

BTW, I had originally uploaded the 1600x1200original, but it was still unmanageably largewhen when scaled down to "Medium". The pictureabove is now 800x600 at "Large", the original isstill available on my own site at:

http://jpatokal.iki.fi/photo/travel/Japan/Tokyo/OldTokyo/Yoyogi_Bicycles_Large.JPG

One last request: might it possible for the photo.net elves to say a few words about why thepicture was chosen? And of course any comments from other photo.net readers are more than welcome.