* Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #796 / Revived #016 on 2023 07 19 *

Another intriguing image that could pass for space photography but we know must be a glass ball or egg set behind a fuzzy orangish fabric. Yet we react to it with the same sense of wonder we would have if it were light years away. Your imagination is limitless.

Wonderful travel photos of a fascinating cultural ritual most of us will never experience. We've come to know and feel loyalty to the Unicorns alongside you. You show us the brilliant colors, the action, the human expressions, set against a background of historical architecture and ancient culture. Very well executed.

The lake looks utterly peaceful here, which I'm sure isn't always the case. This is a pleasing blue light image with excellent balance of elements - the jetties on both sides and the central dock platform with its inviting bench smack in the middle. Just for interest, you have a jet skier moving in just right of center. Nice well composed image.

I do love window reflection pictures. You and Lou are masters of that sub genre. I have no idea what that yellow thing is (it looks more like a prom dress than anything I can think of) but the entanglement of it, the sharp roof angles, the ghostly light fixture, and the utility pole makes for a very intriguing image. Yellow and blue look great blocked against each other, A very abstracted photograph but visually quite pleasing.

Two very different kinds of images of different locations on the same property always invite us to compare. The second image is a a documentary shot of an impressive older mansion in classic style. The first is a gloriously dreamy image that makes me think of impressionistic water colors of European gardens. The sinuous shape of that wall adds to the dreamy effect, as does the glow added in post (I am a big fan of glow). The way you angled the shot allows the snake to wriggle rhythmically off into the distance, giving the whole image a feeling of motion. The patch of grass towards the right edge seems to have got a little too lime for the rest of the tones; I would tame it a bit if I were you.

You've captured Pearl in an attentive pose that to me also indicates intelligence and taking her role as herder seriously. Can you tell I read your intro before examining the photo? LOL

I'm fascinated by your choices of setting and processing: the textures of the blankets, the yellow ( or is it sepia?) toning, and the lack of contrast throughout. The result is warm, safe and loving. I want to cuddle up to Pearl and take a nap.

Nope.
I had never been to this spot before and minutes before I arrived I did not even really have an idea where it was.
It is buried a bit in a more industrial area.

When I shoot the images for a book like that, I visit 15-20 locations (or more) on any single day.
I make a plan in my head of which locations I can easily group and then just get going (car for large regions, bicycle in cities).
I make do with what I encounter in every location, evaluating possibilities on the spot.

Only when a location is really badly lit (if e.g. the sun is really behind a façade that I must get in bright light), will I make a mental note of orientation and return later.
I cannot possible plan perfect time of day (or weather) for +200 locations that I must shoot in a week or so.

TPE (The Photographer's Ephemeris) is an app I use to prepare for optimal time of day, but only for the crucial locations.
Like for instance City Hall in Leuven : I shot that building 4 times from different angles at different hours of the day, including sunrise and sunset.

But locations like this one (that in the end did not even end up in the book) cannot take more than 10 minutes of my time.
So it is really a matter of hit and run.
Get there, get inside (talk to the people if any are present), look for a few angles, get the shots and I am gone.

Honolulu Zoo

Kodachrome 64, Drum Scan

1987 or '88 my wife and I were at the Honolulu Zoo on its front lawn/park area on a Sunday. Noon hour. Many families were having picnic lunches and it was obvious that the park was a popular neighborhood center of community, beyond its function as the entrance area to the zoo.

There was an enormous flock of pigeons gathered in one area. I've never seen one of such size. Someone must have been feeding them popcorn or something. Every 30 seconds or so, the entire flock would take off, rising straight up about 10-15 feet, then settling back again. Each flight was accompanied by frantic cooing, but much more so by the incredible sound of their wings flapping and the rushing of air.

Almost like clockwork, the flock rose and settled, over and over. Endlessly. With that incredible mixture of sound. It was almost mesmerizing.

From about ten feet away, for five consecutive "flights" I shot into the dense cloud of birds. It was impossible to see any detail. It was just a blinding white blur of bird bodies and wings and cooing and rushing of air. I had an inexpensive early Canon EOS film SLR and a 70-210 Canon zoom. I was shooting somewhere near the long end of the zoom range. My first auto focus camera. I just hoped the AF system would lock onto something in the dazzling cloud of feathers each time.

Everyone has had the experience of discovering something they hadn't anticipated in a shot. Positive or negative. This was especially true during the film era, when one often didn't see results of slide film exposures until weeks after running rolls through the camera.

Four of the images were uninteresting blurred shots of pigeons flying around. This is the fifth image. The little boy with the red shirt and blue pants, his mouth seemingly wide and his eyes open in wonderment, in the midst of the mass of flying birds was actually many yards behind the flock, sitting with his family, eating lunch. I never saw him when I was shooting. But the camera did. He was never part of the scene I was seeing. But there he is! And he makes the image.

I scanned this slide sometime in 1993 and, since then, first as an IRIS "Giclee" print and now as an Epson large format print has been hanging in our house.

I show this image for many reasons. One is that I present it as an argument that sharpness can be an over-rated element of image-making. Nothing in this image is sharp. Nothing. There are out-of-focus issues, lens blur, camera motion blur, subject movement blur everywhere. I love it.

Rich

I really love this image - it conveys a feeling of being right there, inside of this giant flock, all that movement and noise. Excellent capture!

I also like your reasoning. While I'd never claim that I don't care about sharpness, it can be very freeing and interesting forgetting about correct focusing and just perceiving the world in a different way from time to time. I even started the thread I've mentioned in last weeks C&C thread about "Completely out of focus shots!" after seeing the excellent harbor lights image @LouHolland

So if you want to add this one/any other image with nothing in focus or everyone else here is curious - please feel invited to add your captures there. I'd love to see some more out of focus images...

Absolutely marvelous!! I can relate to your delight at finding something you didn't know was there. I can relate to your not worrying about expectations and to just aim the camera and capture pixels. A joyous hobby I'm thankful for every day.

Thanks everyone for your kind words - I'm glad you're not bored already seeing another one of my "space-macros". 😅

Of course. I was looking for things to shoot for the flickr group "Macro Mondays" which had the weekly theme "damage" back then. One of the things I took a closer look at, was a tea spoon. While it appears almost flawless to the naked eye a closer inspection with a macro lens, shows an almost infinite amount of tiny scratches and dents.

(Here's an even closer/more detailed image made during the same experiments:)

Intact-ful? Spoonlight by simple.joy, on Flickr

During that time I was quite fascinated with certain different big impacts from space our planet was affected by all through its existence, and when I heard about the "giant impact hypothesis" as one of the possible explanations of how our moon has been created, it's suffice to say, that I was mesmerized by the thought. Particularly, because of the assumption that it might also have been responsible for quite important factors (like the amount of iron in Earths core or the vast amount of water on our planet...) for the existence of life here.

When I started adjusting the lighting and turning the spoon around to find a way/angle to best display the countless tiny scratches on its surface and held it in a way which didn't reveal its shape, but rather made it look like a partly hidden roundish object, I was immediately reminded of that giant impact. I knew what I was going for from that point on, so it was no big challenge to get some debris-looking material in place. At first I thought about a symmetrical placement of the spoon, but when I saw its irregular shape and imagined how the giant mass of our own planet could affect the significantly tinier Theia approaching it, I decided to go with that instead.

It's probably not a big surprise, if I tell you that Lars von Triers "Melancholia" might be my favorite movie of all time, so it was particularly fun trying to create my own giant impact scenario, even if it's just a mere simple macro shot... 😅

Simplejoy,

Thank you. And thanks for the invitation to post the image in the Completely-Out-of-Focus thread. I'll do that.

Rich

LindaS,

Thank you.

Rich

The bike is clever, it fills a space that lacked interest while linking foreground to background. Without the bike, the shadow/sunlight on the ground would have distracted while adding nothing to the shot. Now that line with the bike and the bike's shadow have become a centre of interest. The dynamic is changed.

It is interesting to compare the B&W with the original. They become quite different images. With colour, the grafitti grows in importance, in B&W, the bike/shadow grow in importance. The journey rather than the destination.
The gables on the buildings are also important in the movement from foreground to background.
The shot is a lesson in how an image can be created rather than simply captured.

I had to go searching with the Theia clue to decipher simplejoy's shot. It was worth the trip. I'd love to know whether the image came first and then Simplejoy found the interpretation or whether he had the concept and went searching to make the image. Simplejoy, I don't think you should tell us this, the magician keeps some things up the sleeve.
On this occasion, the title is a good thing. We know the photographer has created an image from macro objects. It's an intriguing image and the title is obviously a bit of poetic licence that stretches our own interpreting of what we look at.
It is a great shape and the shape and textures are brought out with some ingenious lighting. It is exactly from the thinking of the classic photography exercise for students where they are required to light and photograph an egg.
Ingenious and fun.

Fascinating to learn about your inspirations and the steps to complete. Thanks so much for your time! I wasn't familiar with that movie; have made a note to stream it.

Pretty precarious
This shot was taken in 2021 in our local forest, the day after a big storm.
The tree was balancing precariously over the path, looking pretty with the light shining through the split wood, but also looking potentially lethal!
When I returned, a week later, the forest owner had taken it down. So thanks to him for that.
I liked the image partly because of the reaction I got from people looking at it, some liked it, others seemed more perturbed :-)

I like this image .. Having had a minuscule role in our space program in those days when we first went to the moon, I remember and enjoyed those pictures and this image... and of course there was Kubrick.....

WhyNot