* Wed C&C "No Theme - No Brand" Thread #780 / Revived #001 on 2023 04 05 *

Welcome to the Wednesday Comments and Critique (No Theme) thread!

We are dedicated to continuing the great tradition of this C&C thread, because we are convinced that looking at, and talking about images is vital for better photography.

The idea is simple: you post an image and get critique on it, and in return give other people your opinion of their images, or vice versa.

Any Theme, Any Camera, Any Style, Any Subject.

We are still figuring out how to create the convenience of threaded view on this new forum.
For now, let us agree that you post an image with a title and short explanation, and that all comments include the image as a quote.
Replies to comments may or may not include quotes.

THREAD GUIDELINES – THE SHORT & SWEET VERSION
• This thread does not care about brands. It’s not about the tool, but the image.
• Post one image that you would like to get comments on (exceptions: see below).
• Change the title of your post to reflect the image’s title. (IS THIS POSSIBLE??)
• Look at the other images and give your comments on at least one of those.
• For comments, try to go beyond a simple pat on the back or a short dismissal.
• Do you like an image (or essay) ? Try to explain WHY it appeals to you.
• Negative feedback is OK (we all want to learn), but be polite and constructive. Try to explain why the image (or essay) does not appeal to you and how it might be improved.

We will start with single images. Re-establishing our C&C for essays will be a next step.

The critique you give is vital. What was your first impression? What catches your eye about an image?
Why? What do you like, and what distracts you? What would you change?

Fiddle with the image in your head - composition, perspective, color balance, exposure.

It is understood that unless the original poster specifically states that they do not want an altered image posted that you are free to alter the posted image and repost it in a reply for C&C purposes (no use for other purposes!). That reposted image may remain permanently or you may remove it after a short period of time if you prefer. No copyright disputes here!

More general feedback is also welcome. Do you know something about taking the same sort of image that would make matters easier - share your own as an example in your reply. Encourage - it is a scary business putting your work up for other people to judge!

And finally, here are some useful hints for navigating and familiarizing yourself with the forum mechanics of DPRevived:
• Unfortunately, there is no threaded view (yet). We can’t simply keep images and their related comments together like we used to.
So please make clear about which image you are commenting.
• To do that, you may make good use of the “quote” feature. This allows you to keep the image in your reply. Excess content can be deleted. The “preview” button allows you to look at what you are going to post.
• There is a difference between the “reply” button that sits at the top of the forum, and the reply buttons under every post.
• A few threads in this new forum with useful navigation information:
dprevived.com/t/how-to-use-this-site/387/
and
dprevived.com/t/how-to-embed-photos-into-your-post-directly-from-flickr/456/
(this applies also, with modifications, to other photo hosting websites)
and
dprevived.com/t/how-to-quote/1014/

Have fun and let’s stick together!

Not A Phoenix, But...

For the last image in the old forum, and simultaneously the first one here, I picked an older animal portrait.

The cassowary is among the strangest birds.

It is not a mythical phoenix, rising from the flames and its own ashes.

But it does look like an animal that appears to have survived an extinction.
Especially if you look at the fierce head and the mighty legs and claws, they are as close to a dinosaur as you will get in a live animal.

Speaking of extinction, I will, after posting here, go to our old home on DPR to post a final image on it before it goes dark. I hope our regular members over there will come here as well.

My first thought when I opened the thread was of Jurassic Park, and how much this guy resembled some of the more colorful dinosaurs featured in the movie. It's a good sharp portrait (sharpness being a relative quality that I find is a little harder to consider in our new home). The colors are well rendered. The pose is excellent, a classic over-the-shoulder profile stance. The slight catchlight adds some zip to his eye.

I do think the human style framing is less than perfect for this critter. It's popular now to frame with the tops of human heads cut off, but it seems this image would be more satisfying if I could see the top of this guy's headpiece, whatever it may be called. To a lesser degree, I also wish I could see the bottom of his neckpiece, whose name I don't know either.

Thanks so much for starting us off here.

This is a photo I've had out to work on lately in paints, and I want to start in the best place I can with the photo. Shot in the Honey Island swamp in south Louisiana on a dark rainy day.

Reflecting Uncertainty

This image is another from my recent abstract photography efforts. It is a reflection in the rippling water of a marina, taken at a high shutter speed to capture something that is not normally visible/perceivable. Our perception tells us that this is moving around and therefore we don't seem to see a still image here. BTW, the red splotch is a New Zealand or Australian maritime flag.

Photography in many ways seems unsuited to the abstract, unless like Moholy-Nagy one skips the camera part – with digital I guess that is creating the image from the PP software! … Better perhaps is to explore where modern art started with exploring the idea of the flat field … would be interesting but again probably resting mostly on the PP … This picture is too recognizable – a good picture but not really abstract … I'll follow your work here as it progresses but not sure abstract is where photography needs or can to go ….

Now is this a proper critique??!! inquiry? ....

WhyNot

A NYC street scene

I prefer not go into detail about how I made this image here; it tends to dominate the discussion. I will say that the captures were made from a moving car.

Water reflections are a well-trodden photographic path, but that doesn't mean that we should all avoid making those images. If you shoot images of dried mud (a really common abstract subject), be prepared to be compared to all those who have gone before you. Keep working at this; you'll find a way to make it your own.

The series before this one was called "Nighthawks."

CONTEMPLATION

This is a repost from Minniev's trial thread .. I appreciate her resonse but suspect I'll get no more critique over on that thread and as this is official start ...

WhyNot

I love this one - I'm one who tinkers with this genre and it intrigues me but I don't have enough knowledge to give you the kind of critique you deserve so I'll just share my impressions. I love the flow of it. There is a visual trail throughout the image that the eye can follow, but the red shape commands enough attention (red always does) that all roads seem to lead back to it. It is somewhat jarring (red/squarish) amongst what appear to be impressionistic type water lilies floating on a pond but it serves the function as a focal point. As you mentioned, movement is implied in the fluid shapes.

BTW - The first image I posted here looked like yours, only a thumbnail. The way to get it to post in a larger size is
Place your cursor where you want it to be in your message.
Upload the image using the arrow with the little line under it in top of the message box.
A new small window will appear with a couple of icons. Click the one that looks like two overlapping boxes.
Some gibberish (code) will appear on in your message.
Hit preview to check it out. Edit if needed.
Post reply.

Welcome to Wednesday C&C, an old activity that is embarked on an unexpected new adventure here.

Oh my what a nice image! It screamed "Nighthawks" to me before I even opened the post. I love Hopper's work and Nighthawks is a favorite so you have captured my attention right away. It is hard to divorce my mind from the connection enough to give an unbiased critique so I 'll share a biased one. Like Nighthawks, the people in this image "feel" somewhat isolated, even though they are not alone. In the emptiness of the city at night, the people are drawn from the darkness to the light of the bakery, and our eyes follow them. Your color palette, while different from Nighthawks, has a similar set of tonalities (your neon blue serves the same function as Hopper's teal), with the yellow/gold framing the focal point. Whatever you might have done here (burst shooting from a moving car, some kind of in-camera multi-shot combining, layer stack in editing software, or other), it works. It's blurred where it needs to be blurred, and discernably clearer where clarity is needed (the people, the wording, the chrome legs of the unoccupied stool). There is a sense of rounding the corner that is shared with Hopper's painting, though the way that sense is arrived at is very different. Your version has an impression of movement while Hopper's is utterly still. Yours also has a door. Those make your image more dynamic than the original. Fascinating.

As far as suggestions, I have little to offer other than the notion that the stream of purplish light leading from the left edge to the building may not be necessary. But artist's choice!

I do hope when all's said and done you'll tell us more about what you did here. I am always curious about images I can't figure out, and I'm an inveterate tinkerer both in camera capture and in Photoshop.

We've been talking to Alan about this for a few days. This thread has run every week for 15 years on the Oly section and it has always been open to all cameras, all formats, all themes. Our regular "customers" would expect to find us here as we were all these years on the old DPR which had no section dedicated to Critique. No decision has been made yet about moving us to another section of this forum. We are not opposed to it but felt it would be best to start off where we've always been and figure out how to make the activity work with the constraints of flat view before pressing for a relocation, and there are other factors that Alan has to consider too. There is a thread about it, I think yesterday.

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS

BCE Place in Downtown Toronto.

Thank you. About the purple streak. I see what you mean, but I don't like to remove things from images in this series unless I think it's necessary.

Here are some more images from that series:

www.kasson.com/gallery/staccato/

And here's the artist's statement:

"This series is an outgrowth of Nighthawks, with much the same subject matter but a different interpretation. Instead of a making single exposure per final image using motion blur and panning to isolate the subjects and control sharpness, in the Staccato series I take many sharp images from slightly different positions and incorporate them into a single composite image, aligning the elements that I wish to be sharp and letting the others fall where they may. This approach allows more precise control over the important elements of the image, as well as producing more interesting patterns in the areas that were just broad blurs in the Nighthawks series."

Here's the artist's statement for Nighthawks:

"Night in the city. Most people head home, to families, to the tube, to warm beds. Others go out. Recently, I’ve been out there myself, with the goal of capturing a few moments that tell a story or, even better, invite the viewer to supply one. Using fairly slow shutter speeds and making my exposures from a moving car produces images that are more gestures than clear depictions. I use panning to direct the viewer’s attention, making some things sharp at the expense of others. I try to walk the line between pure abstraction and explicit clarity, tempting the viewer to fill in the details."

Chris, I think you were duped by a post Roel made in error in another section of the forum far from our home. Would you mind posting your image here too, as a reply to this thread, so we can keep everything together?We don't have the tools to move it ourselves or to close the thread Roel erroneously posted in the other section. The links in Roel's post (both of them actually) have hints about navigation here, which I had trouble figuring out.