joel benford

Very good.

I would worry more about perspective correciton than blur in a geometric shot like this.

OK, Ron, so medium format is gorgeous even when producing web jpegs.

I'm pleased to see you've discovered the joys of lower contrast, now all you need is a shift lens. :-)

Not such an interesting pattern of lights as "evening rush".

If you have Photoshop, try using the perspective correction feature to straighten up the verticals in wide angle shots like this (to look like a view camera pic).

I like the idea but I think the white light is just a little overpowering. If you could have taken the edge off it, to give the picture a more subtle/understated look, I would have personally preferred it.

This could just be a scanning/jpeg/gamma thing, of course.

I would have tried taking this from a camera position a little to the right, which would place the player's head against open sky instead of the moderate background clutter you have here.

And if you put him a little to the left of centre in the picture, the photo would read as a "cause and effect" story from left to right. People, at least in "the west", tend to read photos from left to right.

"I wonder where the surviving Greek originals are."

Start with the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Capitolene museum in Rome and the archeaological museum in Naples.

If I'd waited for the bus to move, I wouldn't have got the seagull... Besides, I like the bus.

I used colour film and did a channel mix in Photoshop rather than B&W film with coloured filters. I think the mix was heavy on green and light on blue, which is probably equivalent to some greenish glass filter or another.

When I mixed it I went straight for red, which is obviously the standard choice here, but it looked lousy (to my considerable surprise).

This was shot with my new 2 stop soft grad (one of the first times I've used a grad) aligned to the top of the bridge to open out the shadows underneath. I think a one stop grad would have been better -- live and learn...

When I boosted the shadows after scanning to have a look at them I was so amazed to see detail but no noise that I forgot to bang them down again for that classic contrasty B&W look. Oh well, I've uploaded another version which is presented more in that vein.

I would have liked to try a pol here too, but I haven't got one which fits my shift lens (86mm ring!) or my grad holder (Lee 100mm) as yet.

"It would be interesting to know more about these sculptures you photograph."

I was interested in statues long before I took up photography. The ones I've photographed are generally classical Graeco-Roman statuary, with some Renaissance work (which was largely done in imitation). Most of them are Roman copies of Greek originals, which are largely lost.

There was an Athenian sculptor called Praxiteles whose work only survives in classical copies. Given that copies are usually a pale imitation of the original, and Praxiteles is one of the big five or so sculptors even just in copies, the originals must have been sublime.

[That tree stump/branch you see adorning many statues is the sculptor's way of saying "this is a copy"; it's a code that's understood.]

"I have 2nd thoughts about B&W, as the colour of the stone (marble?) is very beautiful & it would be a shame to lose it. "

I also like the colour of the stone walls and marble floor in the Louvre, and the wonderfull sense of light and space in there. Now I've seen it I plan to try and capture it better the next time I'm there.

"What do you think of this treatment Joel? The brighter colours in the bgrd have been desaturated."

As for the people in the background, I specifically like the small splashes of colour. It gives me a sense of there being people wandering around, not a set of dusty statues in an empty room. Ah well...

Perhaps this only works for me because I was there, and I remember walking around surprised an pleased and seeing other people looking surprised and pleased. If you only have the photo, not the memory of the atmosphere to go with it, it might not work so well.

Also I'm fairly colour blind, so maybe my delicate little splashes of colour are big distracting globs of it to you. :-)

I tend to think of this picture as travel photography, a memento of my trip to the Louvre. It would perhaps be at its best in combination with some travel writing, each complimenting the other, rather than as a standalone photograph.

"I will remove the file following your response. Hope you didn't mind ;) "

Please, leave it up so others can see what you meant.

"I'm sure I commented on this before. Has it been reposted?"

This is the same version that's always been up. But I have posted my share of statue pix, many of them in the classical vein.

Clever shot, using the arms to frame the head and display the tattoos. I like this quite a bit.

What do the tats say?