Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => User Critiques => Topic started by: RSL on July 14, 2012, 05:59:09 pm
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They're always important.
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That's a fine one.
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Nice. The local contrast might be pushed a little hard for my taste, the guy's shirt feels a trifle overcooked and distracting.
This feels to me like it falls in that zone between street and portraiture, which I consider a pretty narrow zone. Both give us an instant of humanity, with enough material and ambiguity to paint our own narrative on to. This one doesn't have enough sense of an unfolding event to feel truly "street" but the fact that the man is seemingly unaware makes it not really a portrait either.
Whatever it is, the guy is great, and it's a fine image.
This business of "stick the guy in one half of the frame, and an echoed shape related to the guy in the other half" (note the curve of the hat bill, and the curve on the back of the chair) is something I picked up on literally yesterday in a handful of HCB portraits that were in a thing I was reading. It's effective as hell.
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I think the b&w tonality of this shot is terrific. I might have dodged the face ever-so-slightly and brought down the knuckles on his right hand, but maybe not. It's a tad over sharpened, but I know that Russ sharpens his photos prior to printing them and sometimes doesn't process specifically for online, so it's a non-issue. And of course I love the facial expression. He looks like a real curmudgeon.
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Nice expression of a surviving veteran's world. The cane speaks to his war wounds or declining health. The hat reflects on his pride of service. But what makes this shot exceptional are the empty chairs in memory of his fallen compatriots.
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Thanks all. Unfortunately I have a confession to make: I cropped! When I saw the expression on the guy's face as I was walking by I didn't have time to lift the camera. I shot from the hip with a 28-300mm cranked down to 28mm. I nailed him in the center of the frame, but that's not what I wanted. This is what I wanted, but it took a (sigh!) crop.
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The moral is: When shooting from the hip, don't waste time spinning your revolver around your trigger finger before firing. ;)
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Thanks all. Unfortunately I have a confession to make: I cropped! When I saw the expression on the guy's face as I was walking by I didn't have time to lift the camera. I shot from the hip with a 28-300mm cranked down to 28mm. I nailed him in the center of the frame, but that's not what I wanted. This is what I wanted, but it took a (sigh!) crop.
Human like the rest of us after all. What a relief! Great shot too, all the more so because of the way it was taken.
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The moral is: When shooting from the hip, don't waste time spinning your revolver around your trigger finger before firing. ;)
Your foot and your armpit (not to mention the family jewels) will be pleased if you follow this advice.
I always follow this code; quite easy, really, since I have no firearm worth noting.
Rob C
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Very nice, I liked everything from this picture.
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Great image; I remember it from a previous posting. As for the cropping, my take-home lesson is to do what you have to do to make the shot better. Of course, I, being a lesser mortal, often find it necessary to crop out the entire frame and discard it.
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. . .I, being a lesser mortal, often find it necessary to crop out the entire frame and discard it.
Join the crowd, Dale. And that comes not only from personal experience but from looking at contact sheets from people like HCB and Robert Frank (check the books Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans, Expanded Edition and Magnum Contact Sheets.) Everybody sees the best of the lot. Nobody thinks about the rest.
By the way, this is the only time I've posted this one. There have been others that concentrated on facial expression though.