Sky Jac

[Bruce Cox]

Please critique.

[Otto Phocus]

Could you share what you were intending on capturing with this scene?

[luxborealis]

Please critique.

Looks like a grab shot out the window of a passing car, rather than a thoughtful photograph that actually says something beyond "look what I saw out the window as I drove by". There is potential in exploring the repeated shapes of the SkyJacks (btw, manufactured right here in Guelph, ON!), but this photograph doesn't do it, at least in my opinion.

Someone will find artistic merit in it, I'm sure, especially when one considers what passes for "art" these days (I know, huge generalization - sorry!).

[brandtb]

I think your instincts are spot on here. The movement and shapes of the crane arms and the complimentary colors of orange and blue, along with the fogginess(?) it has great potential. I don't know if this framing helps it though - I would've most likely tried to get the tires meeting the ground - maybe moved out a little generally. Maybe you have some slightly different angles of these as well - sometimes it's worth shooting minute variations...from left...from right etc...or maybe the arms and the upper platforms only. I think getting the color saturation and contrast right is really important in an image like this - don't quite see it here. I would probably get rid of all the wires too. It has potential, not sure if this particular frame is the one - but getting there. /B

[Bruce Cox]

Yes, traffic inspired me to take an alternate route to the drugstore and there it was before me.  I came back with my cameras and can easily do it again, but arranging the fog is another matter.  This is a hand held pano; by the time I got the tripod up the sun started to come out behind them and I under exposed....   

As to the color, there is flexibility there.  I was shooting four frames with a Pen-F at Low ISO "80", f3.5, 1/250sec with a Sigma DN 60mm in landscape attitude.

At the moment we have increasing chances of rain and the Pen-F is not water resistant.  I like the idea of getting more of the scene at the bottom.  There is plenty of room on both sides of the roadway that this backs up on, but it's not a road you want to set a tripod up on.

Thanks for your comments, I will reread them.

Bruce

[BobDavid]

I think your instincts are spot on here. The movement and shapes of the crane arms and the complimentary colors of orange and blue, along with the fogginess(?) it has great potential. I don't know if this framing helps it though - I would've most likely tried to get the tires meeting the ground - maybe moved out a little generally. Maybe you have some slightly different angles of these as well - sometimes it's worth shooting minute variations...from left...from right etc...or maybe the arms and the upper platforms only. I think getting the color saturation and contrast right is really important in an image like this - don't quite see it here. I would probably get rid of all the wires too. It has potential, not sure if this particular frame is the one - but getting there. /B

Agreed. Work the picture in post and you'll be rewarded with a strong image. If you're not conversant in Photoshop, I'd be happy to do the post on it at no charge. It wouldn't take long to make those fixes.

[Bruce Cox]

I seem to have shot fifty eight frames in six minutes in an, as yet undetermined, number pano clusters before I mustered the tripod and the light changed.  I had to get the script back to Stacy first, though I had a lesser camera in the car to begin with.

In an effort to retain some of the fogginess, or blueness of the fog, I processed the files out of raw at 5000 K and +7 red, which I once heard was Olympus idea of neutral.  I tried to generally retain this color through further Photoshopping.

Maybe a larger issue, is my pushing of the darkish foggy grays to black, which tends to dissipate the fog at ground level here.

I went back to the files and stitched a pano or two with more room on the bottom, but more work is needed if ...

Bruce

Post Script to Bob David:  My uses of PhotoShop are self taught and narrow.  I could remove the power lines if wanted to, but I am less likely to want to because it looks like a lot of work.  [as of yet I don't want to]

But you could if you wanted to.  What kind of files should I send you? 

[Bruce Cox]

The four files that made the image responded better to stitched by PTGui than they did to Adobe or there would be even less to the bottom than there is.

The camera was set on Auto White balance and that information is retained.  However, my recent try at splitting the difference with it is not so wonderful, yet.

Bruce

[Bruce Cox]

There is a concrete curb at the bottom of the wire fence, so the one can't see to the bottom of the tires and the pano with the curb and grass below doesn't arrange the canes as well.

In this one I used 5400 K and +7 red.  I let it be foggier by not pushing the darks all the way to black.  I'll think more about the lines tomorrow.

[luxborealis]

There is a concrete curb at the bottom of the wire fence, so the one can't see to the bottom of the tires and the pano with the curb and grass below doesn't arrange the canes as well.

In this one I used 5400 K and +7 red.  I let it be foggier by not pushing the darks all the way to black.  I'll think more about the lines tomorrow.

Post-processing is meant for making solid photographs "better", for breathing life back into machine-made raw files, not for "rescuing" images that really shouldn't have seen the light of day. This is not an image worth spending the time on. Sorry if it sounds harsh, but you did ask for critique. I'm trying to find the "art" in it or even a spec of interest. No go. "The most important piece of equipment a photographer can own is a garbage can/rubbish bin/trash can." (depending on where you're from!).

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

It is certainly an intriguing subject. I would be tempted to walk around with a pair of cropping ells (and no camera), trying different viewpoints and different croppings, hoping that one of them would speak to me and say, "Yes! This shows what these are all about visually!"

I'm not sure there is a way to present them that would work.

Terry's comment reminds me of a meeting of a group of photographers I was at many years ago. One member used at that time an 11x14" view camera from which he made beautiful black-and-white contact prints. The one he showed that evening didn't get much enthusiasm from the rest of us, and after we had all commented, he simply tore the print into pieces. We were all aghast. I had never seen anyone destroy a print before. But he had decided that if it didn't work for these fairly sophisticated photographers, then it wasn't worth keeping.

I tend to keep most of my failed images. Revisiting them occasionally keeps me from getting a swelled head.

[John R]

We come across many scenes which to our eyes looks promising. But as everyone knows, it does not always translate into a good image. We have to learn and practice the way a lens and sensor sees. Learning that some scenes cannot be arranged in the viewfinder to make it visually interesting or attractive is part of the art of seeing and has to be practiced every day IMHO.

JR

[Otto Phocus]

Close to where I used to live, was a tire swing hanging from a solitary tree on a hill.  Every time I passed it, it just spoke to me.  However, I was never able to capture on camera what my eye/mind captured in real life.  It was very frustrating.

[Bruce Cox]

Goes to show you don't have to have a good photo to have a good critique.

Thanks,

Bruce

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

Goes to show you don't have to have a good photo to have a good critique.

Thanks,

Bruce

This new version is much more interesting to me. I would be tempted to remove the wires, however, which is easy in PhotoShop but much harder in LightRoom.

[luxborealis]

Goes to show you don't have to have a good photo to have a good critique.

Thanks,

Bruce

Now there's art!