Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => User Critiques => Topic started by: Harald L on June 12, 2013, 05:08:02 pm
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At Zollverein, Essen
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Like the color and the quasi-symmetry.
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This is a lot more interesting than your typical photo of plumbing.
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Like the color and the quasi-symmetry.
+1
I also like the yellow & white marking on the bricks - they subvert the geometry of the plumbing & brickwork ( almost calligraphic in places ).
Graeme
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Nice one!
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+1
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A very good composition of valves, bricks, with excellent color. One I'd also shoot if I saw it just because it was there.
I would also like to know why it was shot. Lately I've asked myself that question when I'm out and about with my camera, which is always because I always have my iphone camera if not my "serious" Canon.
I'm not singling out this valve shot, but any that appears in the User Critiques section. What's been going through my mind when I see any interesting shot is why should I stop, compose, and shoot. Is this something that I could sell to someone who wants a scenic for their wall? Is this just an "arty" shot that'll go into one of my innumerable folders never to be seen again? Or is it for some series I have already started? I think that to critique an image I'd like to understand the use intended.
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I think a lot of us are with Garry Winogrand, Lou: "I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs."
I frame and hang what I think are my best and I put a lot of stuff in comb-bound books, but that doesn't mean that stuff never will be seen again. I frequently look back. I enjoy looking back at Korea during that war, at Vietnam during that war, and at Thailand from the year-and-a-half I was there. But I also enjoy seeing what places like Cripple Creek and Victor looked like back in the sixties. In a sense, the sequence of the images is a continuum. The whole thing fits together, though there are changes -- eddies in the flow. Then there's the sequence from the prairies around Colorado Springs I shot in the sixties. Those things are gone now, and the images hold what's left of the transition from the homesteaders and subsistence farmers to today's efficient corporate farming.
The world is an interesting and beautiful place. Photographs capture some of that interest and beauty. I couldn't stop shooting if I tried.
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A very good composition of valves, bricks, with excellent color. One I'd also shoot if I saw it just because it was there.
I would also like to know why it was shot. Lately I've asked myself that question when I'm out and about with my camera, which is always because I always have my iphone camera if not my "serious" Canon.
I'm not singling out this valve shot, but any that appears in the User Critiques section. What's been going through my mind when I see any interesting shot is why should I stop, compose, and shoot. Is this something that I could sell to someone who wants a scenic for their wall? Is this just an "arty" shot that'll go into one of my innumerable folders never to be seen again? Or is it for some series I have already started? I think that to critique an image I'd like to understand the use intended.
Thank you. You want to know why I've shot this picture? Oh, that's very simple: because I like it! I'm an amateur and I really don't envy professional photographers. We live in a world which provides fantastic impressions and I have the undeserved luck that I can afford to strolling around to enjoy this colorful world full of wonders, history, crap and ambiguity. Taking photographs of interesting things is often just my way to look to them. Actually I could delete a lot of my pics at once without loosing the pleasure of taking the picture.
Of course, I have a lot of plans what to do with all the stuff I've shot (9 years to retirement ;)). My homepage is permanently under construction, I frame some pictures to give them as a present or to de-decorate my house. I print some books to enjoy my friends and family and I am happy to discuss some here.
Harald
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I think a lot of us are with Garry Winogrand, Lou: "I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs."
I frame and hang what I think are my best and I put a lot of stuff in comb-bound books, but that doesn't mean that stuff never will be seen again. I frequently look back. I enjoy looking back at Korea during that war, at Vietnam during that war, and at Thailand from the year-and-a-half I was there. But I also enjoy seeing what places like Cripple Creek and Victor looked like back in the sixties. In a sense, the sequence of the images is a continuum. The whole thing fits together, though there are changes -- eddies in the flow. Then there's the sequence from the prairies around Colorado Springs I shot in the sixties. Those things are gone now, and the images hold what's left of the transition from the homesteaders and subsistence farmers to today's efficient corporate farming.
The world is an interesting and beautiful place. Photographs capture some of that interest and beauty. I couldn't stop shooting if I tried.
That's a pretty good "Artist Statement," Russ! ;)
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That's a pretty good "Artist Statement," Russ! ;)
Goo heavens! What have I done???
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I think a lot of us are with Garry Winogrand, Lou: "I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs."
One of my all-time favorite quotes about photography.
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The first valve on the left touching the edge disturbs me a little. I admit: it's only my neurosis ...
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The first valve on the left touching the edge disturbs me a little. I admit: it's only my neurosis ...
Honestly, it disturbs me as well.
Harald
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I concur with the expressed point about the close crop on the left. I might also have liked to see it with a longer focal length so that there is not so much perspective on the spindles of the flow cocks.
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Unfortunately this picture is only cropped at the top. For using a longer lens I'd have to blast the opposite wall away first.
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Unfortunately this picture is only cropped at the top. For using a longer lens I'd have to blast the opposite wall away first.
So? You might get a better photograph. ;)
Jeremy
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So? You might get a better photograph. ;)
Jeremy
You're right in general. But always carrying some semtex in the photo-bag is heading you into serious trouble at the airport's security :-\
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I always check ahead to find a source of rental semtex before I go on a trip, so I don't have to take it through airport security. ;)
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Love it - if I have passed by there, I am sure I would have taken a photo too! The handle-less valves at either end add a touch of mystery.
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I always check ahead to find a source of rental semtex before I go on a trip, so I don't have to take it through airport security. ;)
Be careful. Another one post like this and LuLa will be subject of special care... :-\
Harald
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Russ points up a very convincing argument, but I would (and do) have a problem with following that path: I've never felt prescient enough about which bits are going to be of visual value amd which not.
Garry Winogrand's dictum sounds good, but if reports are to be believed, then he failed miserably in that quest: he's supposed to have left thousands of undeveloped films lying untouched in drawers, so he never did get to see how those things looked as photographs. It strikes me more as an unreasoned obsession, a need to be interacting with strangers in order to prove the existence of self. It's not enough to say I think, therefore I am. That might have been proof sufficient when it was first postulated so long ago, but today, with so much media, it might all be illusion after all. Oh Matrix, what seeds you bore. You are now Internet.
As for myself and why I shoot what I shoot these days - I guess it's to fulfil something similar but a step further down the path than Garry's. I know that I exist at a self-convincing enough level not to worry about that, but I do worry about what to do with that existence. As commerce is long gone, all I can really do to maintain the momentum and a sense of inner equilibrium is to react to shapes that, where they were once created, are now found. In other words, as the fuel for the model fires has run out, I burn what I find around me instead. The heat keeps me warm, the mind busy and demons don't come to say hello, smiling and blowing their whistles. It's all reaction now, rather than proactivity, and that makes it far more difficult to get anywhere.
Rob C
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"Komm, heilige Melancholie..."