Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => User Critiques => Topic started by: RSL on April 25, 2014, 10:27:30 am
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I keep coming back to this. Haven't been able to understand why.
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Frankly, I don't know why either!
The only object in focus is the door handle and I do not understand why you are drawing attention to that? Do you know why?
Roger
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Last couple of shots your focus has been off subject. Doing something different?
Peter
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Me too
I'd love to be in the bloom of my youth, but I can't remember it.
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Peter, aren't you assuming that the door handle was not intended to be the subject?
Who knows, maybe it's an allegorical reference to the closed minds of people behind doors?
Roger
Last couple of shots your focus has been off subject. Doing something different?
Peter
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Yes, as landscape the picture has serious technical flaws.
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Hi Russ,
In your shot Fort Meyers, Fl your focus is beyond the girl and is placed somewhere between the headrest and the distant glass...This is why I asked if you were doing something different as far as focus goes. I don't think that the space inside the car is your intended subject, or is it?
Peter
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Hi Russ,
In your shot Fort Meyers, Fl your focus is beyond the girl and is placed somewhere between the headrest and the distant glass...This is why I asked if you were doing something different as far as focus goes. I don't think that the space inside the car is your intended subject, or is it?
Peter
Good point, Peter.
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Russ,
Maybe the truth is that's it's just, well, a bad shot - sorry - which it is. Have you any idea how great it is to see a bad shot coming from you? I take comfort from it because if it can happen to you, it can happen to anybody and it has certainly happened to me many times.
It takes a lot for me to post a picture here and when I do, I look first for RSL's response because I know I'm going to get a very well informed if dogmatic view. If RSL says 'that's a great shot', I glow.
I sometimes wonder what happens when the reverse happens - not too often - when somebody says to RSL -'what the hell were you thinking!'
If I could earn a euro from every silly image I ever took and thought was great, I'd be a millionaire by now - and so say all of us - but obviously I am not, which tells you a lot about my personal shooting/success ratio as against my print journalism backround. You know what they say - ninety per cent of all street photography ends in failure anyway, which is a bit better than the life of any politician - a hundred per cent failure guaranteed.
For me, however, this session is a lesson re-learned over the years and one to bear in mind for any budding photographers worthy of the name: your worst judge is yourself. That's why people send stuff here in the first place - to get an opinion from their peers. Showing off to family and friends doesn't cut it, does it?
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Russ,
Maybe the truth is that's it's just, well, a bad shot - sorry - which it is. Have you any idea how great it is to see a bad shot coming from you? I take comfort from it because if it can happen to you, it can happen to anybody and it has certainly happened to me many times.
It takes a lot for me to post a picture here and when I do, I look first for RSL's response because I know I'm going to get a very well informed if dogmatic view. If RSL says 'that's a great shot', I glow.
I sometimes wonder what happens when the reverse happens - not too often - when somebody says to RSL -'what the hell were you thinking!'
If I could earn a euro from every silly image I ever took and thought was great, I'd be a millionaire by now - and so say all of us - but obviously I am not, which tells you a lot about my personal shooting/success ratio as against my print journalism backround. You know what they say - ninety per cent of all street photography ends in failure anyway, which is a bit better than the life of any politician - a hundred per cent failure guaranteed.
For me, however, this session is a lesson re-learned over the years and one to bear in mind for any budding photographers worthy of the name: your worst judge is yourself. That's why people send stuff here in the first place - to get an opinion from their peers. Showing off to family and friends doesn't cut it, does it?
+1
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Since it's from Russ, I can't easily dismiss it as a "bad shot."
It is rather mysterious, and certainly has "ambiguity."
What is it "about?" I don't know. But something about it invites me to speculate.
There are two people in it, but we only see half of the right-hand person, and since the left person is in profile, we are also seeing only half of him. Suggestions of schizophrenia? Two different aspects of one person? There is a barrier separating the two persons, and the in-focus door handle is right on that barrier, perhaps inviting the viewer to open the door and ... what? Help the two to reconcile? Unlock the hidden meaning?
It also suggests lonliness, two people locked in their own rooms.
Each time I come back to it, I can make up a new story, so for me this is a very rich image.
Cheers,
Eric
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Hi Gang, First, let me tell you I'm happy to see that you're all willing to call a spade a spade. Wish we all could do that more often. Second, let me remind you that I never said this picture is good, I said I keep coming back to it. And I do, but I don't know why. Technically it's crap, but there's something there that grabs me. There's probably something deep in my unconscious that makes a connection, and Eric may have some good points on that idea. A lot of HCB's early pictures aren't great technically, but there's something in those that grabs me. In HCB's case they grab a lot of other people too, and this picture never is going to do that. I'm not going to make any excuses for it, and on balance I agree I probably shouldn't have posted it. On the other hand, considering the honest responses, I guess I'm not sorry I did.
But I need to go back to the Fort Myers shot. I don't know how many of you have done street, but I'll tell you that when you see a shot like that one you usually have less than a second before it's gone. You don't have time to focus before you shoot, so you pre-focus, and then when the picture pops up you just lift the camera and shoot. Sometimes -- often -- the focal point is a bit off. All you can do is hope that DOF will make up the difference, so it's "f/8 and be there." Usually it's close enough, because this isn't landscape. The important thing is the picture, not it's technical perfection. In fact, I'll go way out on a limb and say that unless you're in a studio shooting for advertising, technical perfection never is as important as the composition and the content.
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I am with Eric on this one.
To me, it is about the loneliness of the old age. Resignation. It isn't a picture to let you go easily and quickly. I can look at it for a while and absorb all the details and meanings, symbolic, subconscious. Even the out of focus area does not bother me. The figures are recognizable enough and any more detail and sharpness might actually detract. Not an earth-shattering image, mind you, but nevertheless good enough to cause us, as Russ said, to "keep coming back to it." If my psycho babble is nothing but a post-factum conceptualization, so be it. I am just verbalizing my thoughts.
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Well, since everyone gets an opinion, what grabbed me in the first seconds of looking at it was the glass and the two women. It immediately brought to mind an image of an old woman, sitting in a café and looking at her reflection in the window, but seeing someone else - herself from years ago. A memory. A dream. Who knows? I had a similar experience once, sitting in a café with Marcia, and watching a young woman approaching the (glass) patio door. But when the door opened an older woman stepped into the restaurant. I wrote a haiku about it at the time:
Girl opens the door
but an old woman walks through...
Timeless reflection?
Mike.
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This photo could well go on to be an icon illustrating the pathos of the vernacular human condition in growing old surrounded by the plainness of our built environment. Yes, it is technically flawed, but there are a number of technically flawed images that have gone on to greatness because of what other people see in the photograph.
I have seen far too many images like this take centre-place in art galleries which, to me is frustrating, yet it speaks volumes about our obsession with technical perfection over telling a story or forcing us to pause and ask questions as artists. We see a gazillion beautiful photographs on this forum, but decidedly few that cause us to really stop and think and ponder more deeply - which this photo does. Believe me, I'm as guilty as the next.
There seems to be a fine line between this type of photograph, that forces us to think and ask questions (other than "why"), and some of the photos we've seen lately that cause me, at least to ask "why bother". I think the difference is having a person or people in the photo as we can relate more directly to the human element in seeing in the photograph either ourselves or people we may know.
Thanks for sharing!