duolian

I think the colors here are the product of some fairly aggressive processing by the artist. A photo taken at this time of day (the sun still well up in the sky, judging from the angle at which the shadow falls across the model’s back) is simply not going to have much if any of that “golden” quality of some early morning or late afternoon sunlight. In addition, the poppies (which I’d bet are corn poppies, a Eurasian wild poppy which grows as an agricultural weed in cereal cultivation) are way too orange – that flower is more red, and more vivid, than appears here (see this other shot in Floriana’s portfolio ).

That said, I like this photo a lot and I wouldn’t change a thing. The processing reflects the aesthetic sensibility and judgment of the artist. She made some careful choices to skew this image in a particular direction, and I think it worked well. If it had been a more "straight", blue-sky-red-flowers depiction (perhaps more like this other shot by Floriana), I don't think it would have been as successful.

Okay, it's not a pet -- but this polar bear shook himself off after a

dip the same way a dog does. A faster shutter would have frozen it

altogether but I didn't have enough light for it (overcast, K64).

Anyway, I kinda like the motion blur. Your thoughts?

Jim wins. (Yeah, I knew what it was; I was there at the time, after all).

 

It was actually an annular solar eclipse (it occurred on May 10, 1994), one in which because of their relative distances the moon does not completely cover the sun but leaves a narrow ring at totality.

I was pawing through my old slides and ran across this, and I thought

it would be fun to post it to see if anyone could tell what is going

on here. I'm referring to the strange effect seen in the dappled

sunlight falling on the walk in front of the flowers. It was real --

but what was it?

Howdiddydoit? My guess:

1) Set camera on self-timer, lay it on its back on the ground in front of horse.

2) Chimp result.

3) Repeat as necessary.

Probably still requires Worlds' Calmest Horse.

I tried to level this as well as I could when shooting, but ended up

slightly off. I could have rotated it to level post-scan but didn't.

Should I have? And should I crop to remove the window edge feature

at upper right that kind of muff the symetry? Any comments welcome.

Not PS'd; a real English telephone box standing alone out in the

middle of a field up in the Catskills. I don't have any idea what the

story is behind this. I was just driving by and saw it and snapped

this.

(OK, it's not really "Street" -- except I was on the street, so maybe

it was?...these categories don't always work)

 

Hand(my own)-held, no flash. I like this kind of camera-motion blur,

but it is hit-or-miss, hard to control and predict. What are your

feelings about it? Comments welcome.

I could say that I am so committed to the "found view" school that I

refused to even consider removing the orange traffic cone from the

middle of this shot, but as I remember it now, I think it didn't even

occur to me. Perhaps it's better that it's there. What do you think?

I think this is a very, very fine photo, but unlike the previous commenter I do not care for the lightening of the subject's face and hands. I think it was overdone; I find its artificiality distracting. I think this would be a more effective image with the subject rendered more-or-less straight.

Possibly a contact print from a paper negative? Whatever the effect is a result of -- and I'm sure the effect is intentional -- I think this is a terrific image. It challenges the eye and the mind. I like it a lot.

I, for one, cannot look at this photograph without its obvious artificiality -- not merely the smoothing and other effects, but also the rubber-stamp copying of the boats -- smacking me in the face. It completely undermines any sense of place or mood that such an image might convey. It's like seeing the boom mike dip down into the scene in a movie.

Marc, it's under the "Details" tab, there are entries for "Location" and "Exposure date".

 

By the way, I like this photo; I just would be inclined to tweak curves to brighten it up just a bit. Although I must admit, that now that I'm home and looking at it on my monitor here which is brighter than the one in my office, it looks better.

Thanks for that observation about the exposure, Marc. But what photo were you thinking of when you wrote, "It is also possible that the weather alone - especially with this film, and in an eastern European country in winter - may have resulted in what you see." Details on this one say it was shot on June 5, 2004 in Lake Bluff, Illinois.

This image has a very odd histogram -- entirely distributed over the lower half of the range, with much of it jammed up against the very bottom. Is that a sign that it was simply underexposed by a couple of stops? If the histogram is "stretched" out to remap it over the entire range of brightnesses, the image picks up some life. It's still flat -- both in the physical sense of being all pretty much in one plane, and in the sense of not having much of a range of color values -- but it isn't as drab.

...still one of my favorites from my

href="http://www.photo.net/photodb/presentation?

presentation_id=97863">Roadside Memorials

series. Clearly

disliked very much by many who viewed it, but no one said why. What

do you think?

Aargh, these categories. "Street"? Well, faux street, in that

it's posed (but then, every self-portrait is). If you think there's a

more appropriate category, let me know. But mainly, please comment or

critique. Thanks! P.S. You can read about what's going on in my

hands,

href="http://www.photo.net/shared/portrait.tcl?user_id=257983">here

.

I find this kind of creepy. Was that what you intended?

Looks like there's a light source in the pool of water. I guess there was some kind of image manipulation to get this effect. I really like it, though. Eeerie.

I like this a lot. Would be interested in knowing what the effect is. It does not look like a focus issue to me. I would guess camera movement, but this had to have been shot with a fairly high shutter speed considering the brightness -- or was it not that bright and this was shot at a slow shutter speed, overexposing the sky and causing the camera shake effect? Whatever the case may be, I like it. (Please don't tell me it's photoshopped, though).

Well exposed - great use of flash. Nice moment. But -- "frontside boardslide"? What we've got here, is this guy's backside.

Nice! I just wish I could see the girl's hand. I'm sure you didn't crop it like this, so I assume it just didn't make it into the frame.

I think for something like this you ought to stop down far enough to get the foreground details sharp.

I like this a lot. It seems to me, though, that there's probably more in here that could be brought up by adjusting contrast and brightness. OK, maybe it's just my monitor, but it looks awfully dark to me.

It is possible to achieve a result like this by rotating the camera during the exposure. Possible, but difficult. It is easy to photoshop a rotation effect like this. This looks like the latter.