hatless

It's nice to see a POW that offers so much to discuss: strong technical fundamentals, subtle [digital or otherwise] darkroom nipping and tucking, fastidious studio lighting of some complexity, and a model with skinny arms and great skin tone. Congrats, Marc.

It's not my favorite of Marc's photos and doesn't really even do much for me as far as fashion shots go, but that's mostly because of the high angle and the almost completely obscured face. Having done the Google image search on "wayang" and seen the puppets, dancers, artwork and the like, I get it, though--and I have a feeling this is a solidly effective fashion shot (especially in the warmer, more intimate final crop) in the Malaysian market I gather it was intended for.

(Q: When is it not distancing and off-putting to obscure your subject's face? A: When you're operating in a culture where that kind of thing isn't considered off-putting in the cultural context you're alluding to.)

I like how it's sexy without being lurid. I like the range of textures and the way the parts come together. Again, I'm not blown away, but it is a solid choice for POW from someone whose portfolio has a good number of discussion-worthy shots.Cheers.

While this same composition might have meant something else entirely in Romania in 1981, any time walking around a Chinese neighborhood should be enough to establish that what Westerners call a victory sign is just a fiendly wave with no poilitical implication whatsoever among older men in China. If he were instead a longtime New Yorker who goes out a lot it would be neither a wave nor a victory sign. He'd be hailing a cab. Context means something.

 

It's sort of like how if you take a picture of someone in a vegetable market in Kiev or some other country where this form of Chinese waving instead stands for defiance, and they're giving a thumbs-up sign, they are not saying "right on!" or imitating the Henry Winkler character in the '70s sitcom "Happy Days". Instead, a thumbs-up in that part of the world is how you ask for one of something. Raising your index finger in these places will get you two of whatever it is, since everyone knows a thumb is "one", and you add the index finger to say "two".

 

Next week: an exploration of the semiotics of nose-scratching in Sicily.

Maybe the guy is just waving.

 

Nice shot; great expression. While I can't fault the overall composition, the textures outside the windowframe seem a bit busy for such a close crop.

I agree with Jaap's decision to go with heavy saturation. Thanks, Doug, for the natural-color version and the solid B+W version. For me, they point up how much the lurid saturation is what makes this a worthwhile photo. Without the saturation, it's not something I can get excited about, a mathematically sterile--if "correct" set of lines and wedges with nothing that stands out as a "subject". Hypersaturated, it's a good calendar or travel-poster image.

 

It's not a very relaxing image to me, though. Its strong sense of place puts me in the photographer's shoes, but I can't help noticing that the perspective here implies that the photographer's shoes are planted precariously on the bank of that canal, one slip on the wet grass away from falling in.

I'd like to thank "Bee Flowers" up there for ratcheting the praise down a notch. She or he has a point. It is a pretty common subject in St. Petersburg photography, painting and drawing. Like I said in my earlier comment, it's not even the most fetching of streets by that city's standards. It's a nondescript block that doesn't have local flavor to pin it down, and an angular composition that plays up the cold at the expense of St. Petersburg's romantic sweep.

 

I also understand the impulse behind the crop way up there. The main figure is wonderfully expressive, and makes the picture a keeper, but it is a bit distant. Is the photographer blacking out from the cold?

 

It's an excellent photo and a worthy POW and a saleable shot, but it's not the end-all be-all of winter-in-Russia images.

It sure would be nice if the response form showed the image so we could see it while we comment. Ah well.

 

Excellent, obviously. I'm partial to St. Petersburg streetscapes alongside canals or curved streets or odd corners and desolate squares, myself, but this is nice too. The wind-lashed woman is the real story. It's obviously very, very cold. The body language comes through loud and clear.

Looks like a wax figure to me, and if not I'd bet my pants it's at the very least a staged, made-up shot. It's nice to see a second well-executed POW shot in a row for a change, at any rate.

 

I can't say it gave me goosebumps. I don't think I'm heartless, though. I think it has to do more with the complete lack of eye contact, lack of emotion in the face.. and the distractingly weird hair and hand-sewn straitjacket. The lighting and tonal range are well-chosen here, playing up the damp, cold atmosphere. Same goes for the angles: they work perfectly to underscore the somber sense of isolation Chris was most likely going for.

 

Assuming it is a faked subject, I'm not sure what use this picture can be put to without another revealing the fakery for context. It's too realistic to be a wry comment on museums by itself.

 

If I'm wrong, I'm a bad, bad person. But I'll take that chance.

I see what you mean. When used as part of a layout with text overlays, the elements I wasn't crazy about are exactly what make it good. Lots of sky, very little tree? Good for clean type treatments. Big washes of a single color at the expense of some detail? Good again in this case.

I like some of this photographer's photos, but this strikes me as pretty average. Dancing? If the title wasn't there, I'd sooner have thought she just dropped her cellphone on the ground and was looking for it.

 

The people in the background aren't dancing. Nobody around her is. Between the ambiguous surroundings and the tight framing, all I really get from this is that she's reasonably calm and content. No indication that she's moving much or that there's music inside or out.

 

The subject is photogenic, and the shot was competently taken, so I guess it would be an okay snap for local news coverage of the event, but i don't see more than that.

 

And technically, apart from saying the tonal range is fine and the composition is balanced and pleasing to the eye, what else is there to say about a low-quality, splotchy JPEG like this? A lot of the tonal subtlety that obviously made it to film got obliterated.

There's a little bit of the album cover for Aretha Franklin's "Soul '69" in the pose, and a bit of "Amazing Grace" in the dress. 1960s-70s indeed!

 

i wonder how this looks printed. In this JPEG I'm not crazy about the shallow depth of field that makes it blurry around the hands, and I'd like to have seen it with more trees poking up from the bottom. Nice angle and expression, though.

Maybe I'm just not sophisticated enough to pick up on the subtle charms of this. It's balanced, it's competently framed, it's properly exposed.. and it's a pretty tall guy standing in front of an aquarium tank holding a whale that doesn't seem to be looking at him.

 

The JPEG here is too small and too lossy (note the halo artifacts) to get any sense for how sharp the picture really is. There aren't any strong visual cues to show that the man or the whale are moire than dimly aware of each other, at least to me. And the reflections in the glass of overhead fluorescent lighting and of more lights or perhaps another tank from across the room aren't sepcially bad, but could a polarizer have lessned this?

 

I prefer "Sea Gulls" in this same folder. The image seems more striking and the attempted statement of human-animal connection more successful and enjoyable. This one is just a (pretty tame) geometric composition, when you come down to it, at least toi my eye.

I like this--and I like the choice of orientation here. With the vertex in the lower left third, it looks like a sunrise or sunset. Very clever, and kudos on the near-perfect angle and framing. I think I see a slight upward tilt in the left segment of the "horizon" that sets in much quicker than it does on the right, but maybe it's an illusion and anyway it doesn't bother me. A smart shot that passes the "wall test", albeit probably just for a child's bedroom, for me.

http://www.freemedia.at/IPIReport4.00/ipirep1.jpg

I like the crop not just because it tightens it up nicely, but also because the cropped version doesn't remind me of the above image (Nick Ut's Pulitzer Prize winner). The original unfortunately did.

I'm bad.

 

I like this cleaner version a lot. I'm a tiny bit bothered by the small drops to the left and right and don't think they add to the impact. Still an extremely original and graceful composition.

 

I'm going to surrender here and agree with Tony Dummett's comment in the POW discussion that it's time for you to switch to a camera that can deliver images you can enlarge sharply to poster and wall size. Not everything needs film (or if you have $8000 to spend, an 11-megapixel digital SLR), but this kind of shot calls out for it.

Was the lightbrush only used on the interior portion, with natural starlight picking up the exterior, or did you do this in two phases--a darkened exterior as the interior was lit and then the other way around? This would be amazing enough in Photoshop, but I have a feeling it's meticulous work with nothing but film, flashlights and gels as usual. Wonderfully composed, too.

A luxuriantly dark image like this suffers a bit in this kind of forum. The blotchy JPEG we get to see on your glowing screens is obviously missing a lot of the tonal range that I'm sure is there in the sea of black in the negative and in the prints you've made.

 

It's nicely composed. I think the brighter window front right gives it one of its geometric hooks and some of its balance. I like some of Marc's ideas as far as bringing out the other people a touch more for viewing lo-res on screen like this, even though it doesn't come through in the JPEGs posted here.. I'm sure the truth is in your prints. A good, stately and graceful shot.

Those aren't the strong, though. Police are "New York's Finest". It's the sanitation workers who are "New York's Strongest". Different uniforms, though they do admittedly wear gloves on the job.

Pretty good. The way you brought out bumps and contours and details with shadow instead of trying to idealize reminds me a little of John Coplans's work. I'd prefer to have seen it include more to the right, a view that at least gets closer to the wrist. It seems a touch truncated here. I'd explore this more, and aliong the way I'd try other textures and tones to set the hand against, since the denim catches a lot of the same midrange as your skin.

I think Tony has it right this time, though he's a bit of a Pharissee about it. It's kitsch, it doesn't say much at all, even if it's well-executed.

 

Where I part company with Tony is in rejecting it for not being meaningful. This isn't photojournalism.net or sociallyresponsiblephotos.net. It's photo.net. Emotionally shallow commercial photography has its place here. Fashion shoots have a place here, and sterile, hypersaturated studio stock-photo pieces have a place here. So, I'd think, would the pre-digital avant-garde photography of the first half of the 20th century: the darkroom stunts with overlaid negatives and razor-blade cuts, the abstractions and psychedelic pieces made with starburst and bug-eye lenses.

 

An image like this may not be a call to social action and may not be a historical document, but it can still be an exemplary photo.

 

But in this case, and to my eye, it's clever and shows real talent, but it's not 100% there. The central section of the image seems too bright and undifferentiated. The leafy and fabric-y elements that wend their way through the composition feel more arbitrary than they should be. As a stock image, it could use more background on the top so that art directors have more cropping options available to them. The gear looks too rendered and flat, like something created quickly in Illustrator and painted with a "corroded metal" pattern, rather than looking corroded. The navel and the head seem to be defined extremely sharply, while the rest of the body isn't defined sharply enough.

 

It's a decent postcard or dorm-room poster, and a damned fine framed image for the reception area of a law office specializing in workers'-rights cases.

 

It's good, certainly, and Lasse deserves the attention, but even leaving the silly digital/antidigital nonsense aside, I don't think the massive layering here left enough pure photo behind to critique as such. All I can say for sure is that the model's face and calves were adequately lit and kept in focus. Other than that, the photographic elements are overwhelmed by the artifice. Unlike some other recent collage POWs, particularly the frog-on-the-window one, I don't know if there's enough here to discuss, good or bad.. and that to me is the value in a POW: the discussion of what worked and what didn't and why.

Probably too blurry for a glossy or large onscreen, but reasonably composed.

To each her/his own, I guess. This is nice, but like the frog-on-the-frosted-windowpane image two weeks ago, the composition just doesn't grab me. It might not even be the centering as I said when I first commented on this. It might have as much to do with the vertical tightness, too.

 

The Big Idea at work here is of stillness and isolation of the couple against the frenetic motion in the rest of the frame. Having more to it on the top might undercut the intimacy, but it would have punched up this core idea.

 

Either way I approach the horizontal centering, though, I come up a little cold. Maybe if there was more balance (not symmerty, but balance of weight) on the left and right I'd like it better even with the centering. As it stands, the much higher density (from people and the stairway) on the left, combined with the slight tilt of the horizontal plane downward to the left pulls the whole thing leftward, keeping me from feeling the "static" quality cited above.

I can't let Tony's dismissive anti-digital harrumph go by without commenting.

 

If this was taken in landscape orientation and cropped heavily on the sides, the original is probably around 1500 pixels tall, and will print well enough to show no artifacts at all without a strong loupe at 7"x7". If we're seeing something that was shot vertically, and not cropped too heavily, there should be plenty for 10"x10" printing that will handle close scrutiny.

 

Now it probably is a JPEG and not a TIFF or RAW image, which could mean a bit of loss of detail in the extreme lights and darks, but if you're shooting with an eye to selling, you certainly can shoot that TIFF or RAW, in which case your dynamic range can be quite good indeed.

 

As far as enlargements go, it's pretty shocking what Altamira's Genuine Fractacls plugins for Photoshop can do. You don't get detail that's not there, but you do avoid the jaggies and eneven blotchiness that come in when you enlarge with, say, the usual bicubic interpolation. For something geometric and nearly monochromatic like this, I wouldn't be at all surprised if you could make appealing, crisp prints more than 12 inches on a side from this if you're starting from a quality 2000x1500 original. I'd sooner see the point-and-shoot quality zoom lens on the G1 as a limiting factor as far as detail goes on this.

 

No, you can't blow it up nearly as big as you could the same shot on good 100-400 ISO film, but you may want to have a look at where digital cameras and digital printing have gone in the last couple of years. The Palm Beach Photographic Centre's juried show down in Delray, FL a couple of months back was a real eye-opener for me in this regard. I saw some absolutely gorgeous, extraordinarily sharp and detailed prints, many several feet on a side, nearly all printed on Epsons with archival inks on beautiful matte papers, and a fair number were shot digital, too.

 

Rich detail isn't everything anyway. Long before Velvia, countless enduring classic photos were made from negatives that are mighty grainy by today's standards. The best, when enlarged, make the grain and lack of detail a virtue. On the flip side, Walker Evans did some mighty fine stuff on SX-70 Polaroid squares. The same sorts of things are happening in digital now. People like Wolfgang Tillmans, who you might have no use for, are taking the low-detail aspect of mainstream digital photography and happily blowing it up into prints several feet on a side, artifacts, low detail and all. It's not the right medium for this macro of a water droplet, but it's by no means an invalid or inflexible form of expression.

 

When Eastman-Kodak introduced cheap, rugged box cameras, I'm sure the oldtimers who retained two manservants to haul their view cameras and 40-pound tripods around were aghast at this "coarsening" of their art. Heck, there are people on photo.net and elsewhere who abhor autofocus and autoexposure. Understanding aperture, shutter speed and focal length does make much better photographers, but it's pedantry and some kind of nerdism to argue that using a partly- or fully-automatic camera diminishes the photo taken. Ditto to say that digital qua digital is some kind of Mongol Invasion that is defeating Art.

You have a terrific way with poirtraits and candids. There's a sureness to yoiur composition in these that's not as strong in your landscapes and urban abstracts. Every angle make sense, the framing makes sense, and you seem to catch an aspect of a subject's personality clearly. In your pictures without people, I still sense a clear aesthetic agenda, but they just don't seem as fully realized overall. Keep it up!

I prefer the wider-angle original and don't mind the complexity. It's the tilt that's not working for me.

I like what you went for, but I agree that it looks chopped on the bottom.