ic

i am very happy i found your portfolio. humbleing stuff in there. can't say this or the other is my favourite as they are all excellent as well as very different.

there was this korean movie about the relationship between a man and his washingmashine.

 

the naked radiator on the wall in the back gives it a pretty nice "dirty", neorealist look.

hey, this is loud heavy metal headbanging stuff. i like it.

love this portrait. not crazy for the title thoug :)

 

6/6

i like the fact that we canot see the head of the dummy. it's almost sexy in a depersonalizing mechanical 80's kind of way.

dein ganzes portfolio ist uebrigens eigenartig interesant. Hat mir viel spass gemacht durchzublettern.

 

i

i am lucky for having spotted this picture. and then the rest of your portfolio.

 

7/6

i like the looks on this ethiopian man. not sure he's very old though, but he may be wise :) 6/5

 

i

lovely shot. very original and refreshing

that's what this sport is all about. or should i say sports, plural, to include rock-climbing along with photography.

 

i

maybe a bit crowded, but very expressive. nice shot

somebody hand them a remote control to change the channel. 6/6

Mark, thanks for this picture. I have of course no technical comments on it, not least because i could not get anywhare close to daring to comment any of your picture. I am a total amator who likes to take pictures, of the empiricist self-taught variation and only by looking at your photos i learn more than from hundert useless or praising comments.

I share your interest in children photography and i do my share of it (also because i live and lived all my life in developing countries, where big communities of children, often orphans, are an usual presence). These children are very often forced into early maturity by war, material difficulties or tremendous responsibilities. They are nevertheless ready to laugh and to joke around and they are friendly, warm and full of life. We are too often tempted to patronize them and to treat them with less than they deserve and we are too often insensitive to their need for respect as we get blinded or horrified by material difficulties. Even in the third world children are children and they deserve to be treated with dignity as they deserve to play and be happy.

 

Thanks Mark,

i.

 

Hi Louis:

 

I'm with Mark here. I still think you should post the original. Not as a principle, but just because this immage is so manipulated that it can hardly stand out as a photograph. And this is beyond the fact that i like it or not or that it is a good immage or not. It might be esthetically pleasing or not but it's just not a photo anymore.

 

The composition seems to be very nice though, even if i would have maybe prefered a landscape framing, that would provide more detail on the right and hence maybe bring more perspective to the shot.

i would have loved to see this with the focus on the woman in teh background and the one in the foreground blurred. The fact that the woman in the back looks in the camera and she has some big beautiful eyes is a good argument. Also, a higher contrast would do it better for me. Very beautiful shot though.

the funny part is that he rated 40 or so pictures on PN and the average is close to 8. Not to mention that all his comments are the "wow excellent picture type". Maybe he's a split personality or something

this is the scott edwards that i mean:

 

http://www.photo.net/photodb/ratings_breakdown?photo_id=487968

 

sort'of in the middle of things. i'll update soon

 

this is my favourite picture in this folder (even if thematically i don't see it as a wall-graffiti in the sense of the others here).

What i am very curious about is how did you manage to get your shadow so sharp. I see from the street lights that the exposure was quite long (i never worked with 1600 ISO, but if with a 400 ISO in those light conditions you would probably need 8-10 @ f16, that would make 2-4' with 1600 ISO @f16 or something - you didn't post this information).

And in LA it is also not that cold that you freeze in the middle of the street is it?

 

One more thing: who is that Scott Edwards guy?

 

rebecca, this seems to be the most conservative picture in your appealing portfolio. It looks like applied theory from the books (framing, composition, contrast a.s.o.).

 

Technically it is almost impecable (for my amateur eyes at least - i assume the debatable focus is due to the scanning or my monitor), but i think that the introspection of your character is not as clearly resulting form the picture as one would assume reading the title.

 

We live in a world that is composed merely of symbols associated in our societal culture with various things, feelings & stuff, which sometimes are overrated and turn into common places, described by most knights of aesthetics as kitch.

Your photo is far away from a common place, because it has the decency to be, as i said, classical, both in its plasticity and in its denominations (hey, italian neo-realism is this kind of immages with a spice of social salt&peper).

 

Coming back to your photo, i am very curious why you did´t frame it more to the left so that the empty space is in the characters right side (the side he seems to be turning to), which, deconstructing the assumed feeling of loneliness as faith/vocation, in my opinion, would give more the impression of an overwhealming emptiness, of a fatal desertness: the existential loneliness.

David, i see you did not get the point most of us are making regarding your harassing paranoia.

I assume that your condition is so severe that you cannot refrain from making ridiculous comments and spaming this forum with your mediocre comprehension af the real world.

You are making a fool of yourself and you are pathetic.

 

If you will not understand that the only rules we care for here are the ones of decency, here is what i propose (what am i doing`?):

 

1. I am personally willing, for a moderate price of course, to brief you on the differences between freedom of speech, interstate commerce and the laws of the State of Massachusetts; (in some countries, France for example, it is an offence to engage in onerous relations with an irresponsible, but fortunately for me the governing law will not be the French one);

 

2. for an extra modic amount, i am also willing to make you clear the main differences between FBI, NATO, EC and the Red Cross, acronimes you were delirating on last week.

 

3. As a present from me, for free, i will explain you what hate speech is so that you don´t get beaten up if you will repeat your last week discourses in an analogical realm.

 

I remind you that this site is not called www.letssuetheshitoutofpeople.com and if you have any complains on its organisation or on how members behave here then just (i wonder how to say this politely) go away or if you can´t let go then just sue whoever you want and notofy what authorities you want or find some other ways to waste your energy, but for Heavens sake, let this people here do their photography.

 

 

Thomas and the others, excuse me for what follows but i have to say something:

 

In his bizzare and pittyful seriousness above, david decided not only that this is the proper place to pejorate pseudo-legalistic un-knowledge, but also that in the whole complexity of rules that govern our daily rutine, the ones concerning art are the crux. As for who decides what this rules are, our fellow member is silent but he would rather not be.

 

Continuing to perpetuate his wooden discourse he also finds that it would be a good ideea to burden all the members of this community, just to serve his little purpose: to compensate for the lack of imagination of his legal consultants, who could´t find another way to engage legal responsibility of somebody (anybody) because this forum is nor based on a subscription.

 

I personaly have a lot of understanding with all kinds of human manifestation, including processomania - the disease our unfortunate colleague might suffer from - but egoism, and his small brother egocentrism, has no excuse. And people get beaten for less than being a rat.

 

David, we do not gather on this server to heal your civic frustration or to compensate for your lack of political thought. We don´t gather here to form a support group for your refulating sense of state-coerced justice: we come hear to learn something about photogtraphy. If you understand that feel free to contribute and if you want to boycott this site, go ahead: publish your manifest within your profile and strike by the rules you love so much: restrain.

 

Again, i appologize to all the other members for the non-photographic content of this post, now, if David will not sue me in the next hours or if he will not have the whole server seized, please lets come back to photography.

 

CohenVersusCalifornially yours,

 

ic

 

PS: http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=001YnO

an advice very much followed by some guys makin´good money out there in the show biz.

 

now art, very much like pornography, remains a hot subject of debate. The common feature is that they are both hard to define, while the difference is, i think, that it´s harder to know art when you see it.

 

Sometimes i dare to ask myself, how did art start it´s journey around here anyway? Why did humans decide to use such a complicated way of expression when they could just elaborate verbal communication? Beauty? I don´t think so. Then what? Some naivs, one of which i would like to be, would say art is a mean to express the unexpressable, forgive my comon-placy barbarism.

 

Maybe many of you might know the guys who always hang around other guys who play chess: "Take the horse, take the horse!" is usually the main sound they produce. This guys have passed for ages the borders of chess. They´re everywhere.

Especially where art is an issue. Fact is that more people debate about it than produce it.

And that is freaking good. Because it develops into the potential artist certain instincts which if i was to post this in a more private forum i would call shit-detectors. And that makes, as many fellows above have pointed out, art evoluate. It makes it´s critera change before some smart-ass comes out with an universal receipt or, God forbid, definition.

 

what is, yet, very annoying is the huge spreading of dudes which I would call "artistic Nazis".

Let me enumerate you some of the main characteristic of such a nazi:

 

1. His artistic genre is, of course, the best;

2. Other artistic genres are not only inferior, but they should be with no delay exterminated, along with those sub-artist mates who have the shameless habit of promoting them;

3. Always serious in his discourse (the idiology is a serios matter, no place for triviality)

4. not only that he has a right to judge, but he has the obligation to do so;

5. judgement is not only based on subject of judgement itself (e.g, a photo) but also on irrelevant facts (e.g,i know this photographer is a very bad driver and his wife is way youger than him, too), which turn out in frightening, terrible sins.

6. his weltanschaung is very narrow and he´s very proud of it.

7. his leading priniple: what i don´t know doesn´t exist;

 

In such occasions i generally use the alegory formulated some 1700 years ago by a very famous guy who was tracking his roots back in Hippo, Africa, and who was apparently quite a smart guy: He adviced the ascets of his times to put a drop of animal fat in their feast food, so that it will not happen that they wake up one day thinking that they are so pure that their place is among saints, not humans.

 

take care,

 

ic

 

PS: yes, i know, my photos are quite bad but i´m learning, my friends, i´m learning

i think hands have the amasing feature of being painfully expressive, like very few other parts of the body, but by the almost industrial speculation of this characteristic it is very hard to photograph hands without obtaining a stereotypical wish-to-be-sensitive kind of cliche-composition.

By far you succeded, david: no intelectualization, no inscenation no heavy symbolism.

The shablon compliment-comment on subjects of photography is: i wanna know more about the guy. Well, i don´t wanna know more about walter. I just think what is shown here is enough.

The rest - who is walter, what kind of wise eyes he has, is he a sailer does he have white hair, etc. - i don´t care for, because i don´t want to find out that walter might be just a guy with dirty nails.

 

a powerful picture.

 

now this is what i call a marketplace, not necessary of ideas, but deffinitely a very competitive one. Some of us decided that this community is a very good place to challange the dogma of the 2/3 or different scholastic approaches to photography. Others realised that they are in the possesion of the universal formula of a good picture and reject a priori any attempt to infringe the misterious recepty. Then you have the necessary reaction: people start debating less on the photography and more on the way you criticise it. Some of you think this is bad. I personally disagree: it is very good. Where is the line between constructive criticism and its opposite, which I don't really know how to call (deconstructive ctriticism?- hello Mr. Derrida, wherever you are). I think that line is a matter of personal decision and, moreover, I think no one should censure her/himself more than his personal account of decency would require. We are talking about art&stuff here, people! Art is feeling, excuse my truisms, and anger is part of it.

Gealosy? Envy? My pictures are way better? I make a picture like this whenever I wanna empty my batteries so that i don't throw them charged? All this is the stuff that makes a debate interesting: human reaction. We should thank the elves for keeping our spirits alive and I guarantee you that harsh criticism is indeed more constructive than the sweet one (A very interesting picture, i like the colors very much but i would have made it B/W... ) because we are all afraid of the former and always thankful to the latter.

 

By the way, Chris: an excellent picture.

 

bakuninly yours,

ic