qtluong

Usually I don't comment on images, including mine, but for once, let me tell you what abstract relationships I see here. There are two worlds, the one of man, and the one of nature. The world of man is all activity, colors, and high contrast. The world of nature (this is Halong Bay, one of the natural world's wonders) is intemporal, almost devoid of color, and misty like a traditional Chinese painting. However, the world of man mirrors the worlds of nature in that both have an horizontal outline that is rythmed in one case by the peaks of the karstic hills, and the other case by the pointed conic hats. Even the weights and main gaps in each lines mirror each other. The man in the boat, as well as the smaller moving boats in the background serve further to link the two worlds.

This is one of the earliest travel photos that I still like, because

it combines the mood of an evocative subject with more formal

abstraction.

It was also one of the first photos I uploaded on photo.net, but the

first version suffered from poor presentation. Since I have never used

the critique request before, I thought it would be fun to give it a try.

All comments welcome.

Thanks for favorable comments and ratings on the previous version. Unfortunately, I couldn't stand the dirty border (straight PCD scan of a slide with cardboard mount !), so I had to delete it and re-upload this new scan. Sorry to all of you who commented and rated.

Having written a book about the mathematics of vision,

I can say with some assurance that

regardless of the focal length used, as long as straight lines

are imaged as lines (

no non-linear distortions such as those caused by

fish-eye lenses), the calculations based on vanishing points

that have been posted are correct. This is hardly new. Dutch

painters used similar constructions to make geometrically

correct paintings of scenes that no current non-pinhole

camera could capture because they are so wide.

What makes me think that something is amiss in this picture is the fact

that the camera height above the ground would have to be

much higher than the people's heads. Yet, as far as I remember, there is

nowhere in St Peter where such an elevated viewpoint could be found. For reference, here is another picture

of the interior of St Peter. When I was there, the feeling of size

was overwhelming, yet I found it difficult to convey that feeling in

photographs.

This was done with a focal of around 200-300mm

standing at the edge of the flow, ie a few meters

from these ripples.

I am not sure what Peter's comment mean, as

I don't see excessive convergence in my image,

which was not taken with the 24 TSE Canon for

nothing :-)

Buddhism teaches that the universe is a flux and

that everything is impermanent. I had that in mind

when I made this photo, and used a 30 second

exposure time (the most my camera could do) to get the motion in the clouds.

This was done with a 24mm lens (the Canon EF TSE,

although no movements were used). I might also have a GND, but I'd have to refer to notes. The slide is actually sharp. The problem with an image of this type is that the perceived

sharpness depends critically on

very small elements (the backlit cacti needles)

which cannot be accurately rendered in a

medium quality 640x480 jpeg. And of course, this

is nothing compared to the 5x7 transparency of

the same scene I made a few minutes before...