markci

Some of the posters have said that this is a cliche topic; but, I have spent years of my life in deserts around the world and have never seen this.

That's really beside the point. Spend years of your life looking at landscape photos and you'll see it a hundred times. It's right up there with Slot Canyon and Arches National Park.

Anyway, it's better than the average snap, but I don't think the composition is too interesting. The most interesting feature of these shots is the sinuous tracks the rocks make, and you've reduced that to insignificance.

What a crock.

There's a very strange outline in the sky around the building. An artifact of oversharpening, maybe?

I don't care for it at all -- far too busy. Everything but the kitchen sink thrown into this one.

Jesus god, Jason, you'd do _really_ well in a postmodern lit crit class. That's not necessarily a compliment.

 

It looks like an explosion in a chicken coop to me.

 

 

 

 

A newt's not a lizard (unless you're talking about Gingrich). It's a salamander, an amphibian.

 

At any rate, I like the color contrast. Don't sweat the manipulation -- I might have actually gone further and cleaned up the rock a bit too.

Interesting, but it's sort of ruined by the cowboy not being in focus.

Aside from the vignetting, there's nothing really wrong with the sky, but there's too much of it.

The shadow is obviously a problem, as you've recognized, and so are the burned-out highlights. If you're going to shoot in contrasty light, use fill flash or a reflector to fill in shadows. Or better yet, wait for an overcast day or shoot early afternoon or late morning.

I think the frame is a bit too empty and the bird too centered to be really interesting.

Neat and original. For what it's worth, it wasn't obvious to me that it was a kite. Though I see it now, I was thinking it might be a leaf on a twig until I saw your comment. It might be more obvious in a larger size.

 

At any rate, it's very nice.

It would have been more successful if it were simpler - ie move in tighter on the corn lillies and exclude the other vegetation.

What has this got to do with photography?

I understand. I don't think it's such a bad little photo, actually. But if you want critiques it might pay to sound a little less crabby and take whatever comes along. If you don't think the comment is worth anything, you can always disregard it.

Well perhaps it would help if you told people exactly what you wanted their critiques to say as well.

I'll tell you what's not original: calling people who have the guts to critic the image "sour grapers".

Very true. Some genius who can't stand the thought that other people don't agree with him does it every week.

Nobody was critiquing it as unoriginal anyway. We were simply trying to put an end to the initial stream of tyros wetting themselves over a trick we've seen a thousand times.

You're free to think it's original or it isn't. You're free to think people who criticize it as original or unoriginal are right or wrong, or that originality is important or it isn't. (Personally I think there are original bodies of work, but original individual photos are pretty rare).

But when someone attributes, without a shred of evidence, nefarious motives to people he knows absolutely nothing about, that obviously says a lot more about him than anyone else. Assuming that people who disagree with you in subjective matters are objectively wrong is one level of self-delusion. Concluding that their opinion must be the result of some character defect, which you then advertise widely, gets into the realm of zealotry.

OK, I give up. What in the world does this have to do with marriage?

There used to be some extra feet in the photo, but I PSed them out for a stronger visage-ual effect.

How many feet does your son actually have? ;-)

Very nice. It looks like it was taken 100 years ago.

I think it works. I like the symmetry and the complex arrangement of shades and shadows.

I like the grain a lot, and I don't believe for a minute it was simply what he "had in the camera."

Whether a photo is posed or not is essential in some contexts, and irrelevent in others. One problem with the POW is that there's no context. I don't think this is being presented as unposed, though, so I don't care.

Here again we have a photo I might like better if I saw it larger. I don't know. I mostly wonder what the girl is looking at. The window behind her, it looks like, but that makes me want to see it too, and I can't. Maybe that's the intention of the photographer, or maybe it's an artifact of low-res web reproduction.

Looking through your folders, it looks like nearly every one of your images is composed with the animal (or flower) dead center in the frame.

I think I might like it better if I saw it larger. As it is their eyes are very small and, combined with the fact that they blend in with the dark feathers, hard to see. That lessens the feeling of contact I have with the subjects.

It's not symmetrical! Which is good.