ashleypomeroy

Well, it's pretty poor. On a technical level the shutter speed was too low, and the selective colour treatment looks awful and doesn't make any sense. But that's just detail, it's unimportant compared to the art, and in this case there's no emotional content, no feeling, no character. It's just a slightly creepy candid shot of a nobody looking at a lot of icons on their laptop. There's no connection with the subject on any level. The composition is awkward, and my eyes keep drifting towards the paper towel dispenser. I can't think of any great photographs that used a paper towel dispenser as a major compositional element, and this isn't the first. It doesn't even work as voyeuristic pornography.

At first I thought this was called "Poor Composition", which would be an unusually honest title. It's basically a half-baked semi-idea executed in an indifferent way. It would work slightly better with the barrel distortion and the tilt removed.

I took this a couple of years ago with a Kodak DCS 560, because I've

long been curious about the prehistoric early Kodaks; it was

surprisingly tolerant of highlights, although you can see that totally

blown reflections aren't very attractive. Never managed to get

realistic-looking colours, but I have other cameras for that. EOS-1N

body, five autofocus points arranged in a line, and I used the fifth.

Canon 50mm at f/2.8 or thereabouts. Ulorin Vex is fab.

If nothing else, I'm genuinely curious as to why some people's hair is

blue, and other people's hair is just plain white, even with the same

white balance. Bad diet? Drugs? Shampoo?

Cor, I had one of these cameras. It also had a purple band along the bottom; I'm glad to know I wasn't doing something wrong.

This one reminds me of "2001". I would bump up the contrast, but apart from that it's lovely and very mysterious. It looks like milk being poured over tinfoil, lit with some coloured lights.

I used to be a member of Nawashibarim and I thought it was fab; in general this strikes me as the kind of image where the technical nitty-gritty of photography is subservient to the scene-setting, and there's nothing wrong with that. I like to think that there are many different kinds of photography, and in this case the art happens in front of the camera rather than between the lens and Photoshop's File-Save As menu. Not that I think it's a bad picture, it's wonderful, but it's wonderful because the model and her clothes look fantastic.