ian_white2

This picture is low grade garbage. It does not deserve the bandwidth to display it.

What I see is a group of people probably from PNG, but only because you say so. Some are waving, some smiling, one picking his nose. They are highlighted against a background of a tropical forest and large, old corrugated iron buildings.

That is what I see. Then there is your title and political statement supporting the image.

The two do not connect either from a photographic point of view or a political point of view.

You make dramatic statements about exploitation. They may be true, but they are not supported by the image. In fact one could make the opposite argument. Your other work in the PNG folio regards the “Mud Men”, and it would be easy for me to say that mining development has brought such social advances as the move from Mud Men to these “happy smiling villagers”.

In another life, I have been involved in mining development in remote parts of the World. Yes, they use many foreign nationals in their mining operations – that is because the local “Mud Men” have very limited skills in handling heavy machinery. Yes, they sometimes  make large profits, and all of those are contracted with the local governments before beginning operations, so appropriate royalties are paid to the local Government. What they do with the money is up to the local Government, not the mining company, and not to a photographer with a social axe to grind.

This whole process can be handled well, and an example of that is a Canadian company called Cominco that managed mining operations in the Arctic. It was later taken over by Teck and they continued with their plan to develop a zinc deposit in Alaska. The local people were involved at all stages and the Eskimo elders were in full support of the project. It has been a great success.

One of the major mining projects in PNG is Ok Tedi. It nearly bankrupted the company developing this gold/copper deposit. Yes it is capital intensive (and the Mud Men did not put any money into the project because they had none). It is now owned entirely by the Government of PNG and accounts for 32% of all the export revenues of the country.

So what is the problem here?? It is a photographer who deliberately misstates the facts and does not support her statements with visual evidence. I suggest that the Moderators of this forum remove this image.

Having said that, some of her other images in the galleries are very good.

The post processing really destroys the dramatic nature of the image. I agree with Peter E, the colours are way off and it looks like a cut and paste job. The jacket and cap would be black not blue, and the kilt is ridiculous. My monitor is a graphic arts monitor and gets calibrated frequently.

Hmm. An interesting take on a nice old building.

I got married there so I have no reason to like seeing it again, but I would never have recognized it from this panorama.

I like the crop much more. I think there is a comfortability limit to extreme wide shots when they are of man made structures and this goes beyond that limit.

This is a good shot and I agree with the other critics that it would be nicer if the moon was higher in the sky.

However, on several occasions I have experienced the frustration with posting a good pic then having other people suggest changes which were clearly impossible at the time.

I know the location of this shot. It is about one mile South of the outer islands protecting Toronto harbour. It was taken from a boat, probably one of the many tour boats that cruise the area with up to 500 passengers.

Unless Jesse was the skipper of his own boat he had virtually no possibility of telling the captain to go back a bit so he could get a better shot. Under the circumstances this is a good shot.

Manuel’s series is an interesting variety of good work.

However, when we look at the firefighting shots, I think a North American firefighter would laugh his head off.

From a photographic perspective the exposure, the colour, the drama, the composition, are all there, but they are all shots of a training scene with newbies.

Fire! looks like a bunch of girls decked in red – no problem with that except their hair seems to be hanging down their backs and likely to catch on fire in a real scenario. Their boots seem to be soft rubber with no tibia protectors.

In all the shots of fires their clothing is suspect – no bunker gear, no breathing apparatus, their boots are pathetic. Take a look at Fire!1 their boots look like regular shoes – one guy even has brown shoes. This is not a realistic fire scene – at least to North American eyes. It might reflect on the difference in philosophy regarding attacking fires in burning buildings. In Europe the approach is containment (to stop the spread to adjacent buildings), in North America it is to go inside the burning fire and initially search for people who may still be inside, and then to try and save the structure. The latter requires much better equipment and different technique.

Of the series I liked Splash the best, for obvious reasons.