Luminous Landscape Forum

The Art of Photography => User Critiques => Topic started by: Jonathan Wienke on January 25, 2007, 01:36:33 pm

Title: Dichotomy
Post by: Jonathan Wienke on January 25, 2007, 01:36:33 pm

I'm a bit unsure how to categorize this shot; I thought the fence post with frost on one side and none on the other was an interesting subject, but I'm not sure if I exactly succeded at making an image out of it.

Title: Dichotomy
Post by: Ray on January 25, 2007, 08:50:03 pm

I think this is verging on the abstract, Jonathan. Since I'm not keen, in general, on the medium of photography being used for abstraction, I shouldn't perhaps comment.

However, I have got the impression with many of your images that you are oversharpening the jpegs. This image seems sharper than reality to me, but without the subtle detail of reality.

Title: Dichotomy
Post by: Kirk Gittings on January 25, 2007, 09:58:33 pm

Personally, I think the image is intriguing.

Photography emerged as a fine art just as modernism was ascendant in the visual arts as a whole. Much of the best landscape work of the "masters of photography" from mid century was rooted in abstraction, Weston (Edward and Bret), Abbott and even some of Adam's best images to name a few.

Title: Dichotomy
Post by: Lisa Nikodym on January 25, 2007, 11:35:49 pm

Sorry, I look at this one and think, "Image of frost for a meteorology textbook."  Not enough "artiness" to it to be interesting as anything else.  Perhaps a much more tightly cropped view without the top of the post, with the vertical edge off-center, and I'd think differently.

Lisa

Title: Dichotomy
Post by: jule on January 26, 2007, 03:10:31 am

Jonathan, I don't think it is abstract, and as you identified seems to be lacking something.

What about bringing in the texture and the 'dichotomy' aspect a bit more strongly by this crop?

[attachment=1650:attachment]

Title: Dichotomy
Post by: JRandallNichols on January 30, 2007, 10:36:05 pm

I actually love this image, but its main problem is that it does not appear at all to be "a fencepost."  It looks like two posts side-by-side and so I don't get any of the feeling you apparently wanted of a single object in two radically different states--which would have been very intriguing.  That may not be possible after all, but doing some curves and cloning to make the snow background completely white might also help the abstractness of the image.

Any possibility of a slightly longer shot which would unify the two posts?