Luminous Landscape Forum
Site & Board Matters => About This Site => Topic started by: Isaac on January 23, 2013, 12:48:25 pm
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Figure #7 - Staircase and Leaf
The gesture provided by the triangle of stair at the top is so strong that subconsciously I'm bothering about what may be around the corner.
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Very glad to see Michael back in San Miguel and shooting up a storm. Can't keep the good guys down.
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Yes Isaac +1.
Great article Michael. It reminded my of the video interview you did with Jay in his old Bank Building some years back. It must have watched that video ten times.
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I enjoyed the article, thanks for that.
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+1 to great article Michael. I persued your recomendation of a few years ago and spent a week with Jay. To say the least it was a life changing experience but it was and has been reinforced by your work and your words.
One Jayism that sticks in my mind and always comes forth in your work was, "Moments are little miracles that happen once, you react to them and no one can repeat them, not even yourself. You can't think, you must feel it. I call it stomach photography, it is a reaction to perfection."
You always seem to see and react to those little moments of perfection.
Thanks,
Dave
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I sure enjoyed this essay. I can find a lot of teaching on the technical aspects of photography, but rarely something intelligent or I should say understandable about content. It can be so subjective, but as Michael says, there is indeed something that makes a photo successful however hard it is to define. This piece inspired me not only to write a little blog on the subject, but to do an exercise on some photos I'd taken to look for contrast, gesture, and implication! And it caused me to think a little differently, rather than just did I use "the rule of thirds?" or selective focus or proper exposure, etc. All important to be sure, I am glad Michael helped me think about this and, as a result, I became a newbie to the group in hopes of improving my own photography.
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This essay contains perhaps my favourite MR quote:
"What's this image about?"
and that is a question that I have been asking myself when I'm taking a photograph since I first saw it posed in one of his essays. In various situations, it is a simple answer - a baby, a car - but in many landscape situations asking it forces me to think about my composition for a few extra seconds. I'm not sure if it helps, but it does give me pause enough to take a few less random photographs that would otherwise not amount to much and to reconsider both the subject and framing.
Interestingly this essay links to the much older essay on colour. I'm starting to wonder if perhaps writing about colour is so dry that it compels the writer to use dull images because the images in that essay are almost as underwhelming as those in Alain's recent series. However if someone were to take the image of the stairs from this essay as an example of complimentary hues/saturation of warm colours, I'd totally get it.
I'm curious as to whether the images presented in this essay were cropped to try and match the ratios of complimentary (contrasting) colours of the "Colour Theory" essay or not?