Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => User Critiques => Topic started by: Chris Calohan on July 06, 2012, 05:53:53 pm
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(http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7253/7516993776_8b0c0d855d_o.jpg)
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Both of the horse photos are basically portraits. There's not enough environment to make a "larger" photograph, it's just a horse with barely enough surround to recognize it as "where one might find a horse naturally"
This works great for people, since we find people interesting, and our brains actually have an immense amount of machinery in them for interpreting faces and body language, so a similar photograph of a person gives us a great deal of stuff to look at and thing about. We can write our own little narrative of the person, and so on.
Horses, well, I at least have no such similar machinery in my brain, so it comes across as just a handsome specimen of a horse. I feel no story, I feel no urge even to invent a story. I think if you're more "horsey" than I am (I like horses just fine, and have ridden a few, but no more) it might speak more to you. You might feel the weight of legendary thoroughbreds in this image, you might feel a thousand stories -- I dunno, I don't!
I like the color more, the b&w is too dark for me (which is weird, I *love* that dark shit, shove the shadows down black, go bold and dark, I love it all!). The lost detail in the horse seems to somehow damage the small amount of appeal this photo has for me.
If it were MY horse, I think this photo would be fantastic.
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I also think this is too dark; there's detail in the deep shadows which just isn't visible. The colour version works better.
Jeremy
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It's a beautiful horse, but if you look at the color version you realize it's almost impossible to separate the horse from the door behind him. If you have a couple days to work on it you might be able to come up with an accurate enough selection to do it properly, but none of the quick selection tools are going to help, and a control point in Viveza won't help either because the color and tone are too similar. Beautiful horse, but he needs to go somewhere else for his portrait.
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It's a fairly simple process to convert this photo to b&w while preserving tonal separation between the dark horse and the background. For this I began with Photoshop's infrared conversion filter and played with the sliders until I got the tonality I liked. Then I added a tad of vignetting.
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Good job, Pop. That's as good as it's going to get. But I still think the horse needs to go somewhere else for his portrait.
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It's a fairly simple process to convert this photo to b&w while preserving tonal separation between the dark horse and the background. For this I began with Photoshop's infrared conversion filter and played with the sliders until I got the tonality I liked. Then I added a tad of vignetting.
Have never tried the infrared conversion filter technique...but shall when I return from my present journey...thanks for the advice.
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Have never tried the infrared conversion filter technique...but shall when I return from my present journey...thanks for the advice.
I don't automatically use the infrared filter when doing a conversion. After looking at previews with a few of the other filter presets it simply seemed the best one to use as a starting point for this particular shot.