Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => User Critiques => Topic started by: RSL on July 29, 2017, 10:39:46 am
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This won't knock your socks off the way postcard pictures do.
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Good one! Maybe not a post card but I am increasingly enjoying shooting this type of shot. Seeing and dealing with very transient light and trying to keep the composition clean is a challenge. Small slices of life are often more revealing that the big picture. As your title indicates - sometimes the joy in is the detail.
Chuck
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Thanks, Chuck. I'm afraid a lot of photographers go out with their eyes zoomed in to a wide-angle view of the world. They want to catch a whole mountain range the way Bierstadt painted them. Sometimes they succeed. You see those successes on postcards and bank walls. Wham! But real success in that attempt is vanishingly small. My advice to photographers going after nature is to put a long lens on the camera and start looking for significant detail. All creation is captured in a single leaf. All you need is the right light (which itself is rare). It always comes back to HCB's: "Photographing is nothing. Looking is everything."
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Good one. I like the way you caught the morning light. I agree with your comment about a tendency to shoot wide. I like that your photo is not macro.
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This won't knock your socks off the way postcard pictures do.
No, it does so in a different way. I love this kind of thing: I look, but I seldom find it.
Jeremy
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Wabis-sabi rules. A perfectly heathy young leaf would have been meaningless. Apart from being too opaque for the effect.
No, it doesn't speak a "message", as it were, but as I assume not all leaves of that breed look like that, in an oblique way it got me thinking and questioning!
;-)
Rob
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Hi Jeremy, I rarely find that kind of thing either. I doubt anyone does. In "On Street Photograhy" I wrote: "Fact is that even when you get good at street photography you'll shoot bags and bags of bloopers, a smaller number of not too bad shots, and the rare picture you should be willing to show. Beyond the rare picture that's showable there's the kind of picture upon which you'd be willing to hang your reputation. If you can average one of those a year you're getting pretty good." I think that actually applies to any kind of photography.
And you're right, Rob. This kind of leaf lasts less than a day before it fades and drops into the drink. I shot this one at first light and already it was on its way to the great unknown. I'm getting old enough that it sort of speaks to me with a message.