Nick Brandt

[jjj]

I think your shot is rather well done, but that still doesn't make me think that the technique/facility you display makes it any more worthy.

To be honest, there is something about that sort of photography - not just yours, I hasten to add, and no disrespect - that simply shuts a door in my mind.
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Or it's simply not to your taste, but equally that doesn't make it any less worthy, would be an alternative viewpoint.
Personally, I would have angled the knife more to improve composition. Just MHO.

[jjj]

As for the secrecy thing. I have to say I find it irritating when people simply want to know how an effect is achieved, so they can copy someone else's style. Plus, when someone has a distinct and very identifiable process, like in this case, that the photographer may have spent some time developing, why should he/she tell anyone who asks how they did it. They can if they want, but also if they don't want to, why should they. Nothing to stop you discovering it for yourself.
Would you moan about Chanel not sharing the particular blend of substances that made up their perfumes? Try it and see what they say.    Remember Chanel are in business and it's in their interests not to give their competitors an advantage. Likewise, why should a working photographer tell every Tom, Dick and Harry how he achieved his unique look? As then everyone will try to emulate it. Most will fail to achieve the same level, but by the very fact there will be a lot of similar looking work out there, the originator of the style will find his own work devalued.
HDR imagery was interesting when it first appeared but it has since become a bit of visual bore, like beveled buttons were in web design when PS introduced the bevel filter.
Years ago, say in Adams time, ideas and techniques spread slowly, now they can go around the world and it's forums in a couple of hours and within weeks the web is flooded with lots of samey imagery.

And if you were impressed by Nick Brandt, check this out. Serious dedication involved here too.
http://www.ashesandsnow.org/en/flash-popup.php click on 'explore' to see pictures.
The website has an interresting interface!

[st326]

Or it's simply not to your taste, but equally that doesn't make it any less worthy, would be an alternative viewpoint.
Personally, I would have angled the knife more to improve composition. Just MHO.
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Actually, I do believe you only really know you've done something good when it manages to provoke a bad reaction in a proportion of people. I don't take that kind of thing as an insult -- quite the reverse!

On the composition, I agonised over it for quite a while, but ended up going with what had been in my head in the first place. I got a nicer reflection on the knife blade at that angle, so I just left it be.

I think that this kind of 'creative' work is a lot different to my landscape stuff in concept as well as execution. With landscapes, you basically turn up, pick a location, find the right  time, and shoot, but composition is essentially limited to what's there (assuming you're not going to attack the countryside with enormous backhoes or something!). The 'creative' stuff (I hate that term, but it seems to be what people use to describe it in the photography community, so I'm stuck with it, I think) typically starts as an idea, and I then make the whole image *from scratch*, finding or making any necessary props along the way. It's a substantially different approach. Also, I find myself using colour for the creative stuff, and hardly ever for landscapes. Neither of those things seem particularly to be choices, it's just that it seems to work out that way. It seems wrong somehow to call both approaches photography in the strictest sense of the word. The Ashes and Snow site that you linked has some amazing images (it pushes a few too many cliche buttons for me, but it's certainly beautiful work), which clearly fall more into the creative camp than the straight photography camp.

It's a big world. There is room for plenty of approaches. If a whole load of people started copying my style, I'd find that highly entertaining. But then, I don't need to earn a living from photography, so my mileage varies -- I can do whatever I like, and don't particularly need to care whether it caters to a specific (or indeed any) market. Then again, I'm not a one-trick pony, so even if people *did* copy my style, I'd probably be doing something else by then anyway.

More realistically, I think the probability of people even noticing that I, or my photographs, actually exist is so vanishingly small that this is all fantasy anyway. In the mean time, I'm intending to keep having fun clicking those shutters.  

[barryfitzgerald]

Nice work...

Though for my tastes a little overprocessed. But each to his own.