* Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #844 / Revived #064 on 2024 06 19 *

I have no reason to believe that is even close to being true.

If it is as common as you imply, post some links to C&C where the critic uses 3rd person plural to refer to themselves only.

Thanks Chris. Indeed the photo is all about our complicated and troubling history, and the gritty monochrome seemed to fit.

So glad you asked, Kumsal! As Mike assumed, it was a museum visit. My 14 yr old grandson had learnt in school that there was a civil rights museum in the city and asked if I'd take him once school was out, so the first day of summer break we went, and the 12 yr old wanted to go too. They were both intrigued that I had lived through the 60s and had first hand memories to share that paralleled the powerful displays in the museum. This was an actual cell taken from a jail where young people not much older than them were once held for the crime of participating in a peaceful protest march and some lost their lives for it. The museum had a powerful impact on my two boys and it seemed to show when they entered the cell which is why I snapped the photo.

You picked out all the elements that I saw when I took the photo without warning them, so I could talk to them later about the impact of the experience. The museum is exceptional, rated among the top museums in the country. The 60s and 70s are ancient history to these boys, who are baffled as to why all this happened. They have friends, neighbors and schoolmates of various ethnicities and religions, their heroes and idols are diverse, and the civil rights movement seems as distant as the Mayflower. What I caught as a family talking point seemed able to be applied beyond, so I shared it here.

The photo is so colorful that I saw the child at second glance.
The child's action takes the photo to the highest lev

Dan, I'm not going to play.
You can do your own self education in your own time. I was a secondary school English teacher for some thirty six years. In the normal course of things I might have expanded on the explanation but I have seen some of your online arguments previously. You and I will discuss only photography in this forum.
I'll continue to use pronouns in the third person according to the broadly held conventions.
On each occasion feel free to make a response saying I'm not speaking for you.

@Bryan. Thanks, your note is appreciated however I suggest you don't go further down the wormhole of this topic.

Another photo that I have looked at, gone away, come back and looked again, gone away etc. This is a different approach to the "combine an old and a new" technique. You have three distinct horizontal slices. It reminds me of a feeling I occasionally have in Europe when all that history can feel like a weight that has to be preserved, where the past can feel more important than the present. The towers here are more than reminders, they press down on the commuters going about their lives. They are sandwiched between the weights above and the older structure below.
It's an image where the viewer (sorry, I can't help myself on this occasion - Danny may wish to exempt himself from "the viewer") can build different narratives. The construction tower on the left might be symbolic, or it might be ignored. The image could be cropped in different ways and each crop would prompt a different response from the viewer. I'd be interested in a vertical crop on both sides of the three older towers but that's because of the appeal of the weight pushing down interpretation to me.

As you are entitled to do just as I am entitled to respond to ensure there is no ambiguity or misrepresentation on your part.

No issue here because "can build" means they might or might not be able to build different narratives or might not even want to.

It's when you use 3rd person plural pronouns like "we" to say something will definitely happen, as you did earlier and i subsequently corrected at your invitation, that leads to ambiguity and potential misrepresentation.

Had you said "The viewer builds....", "The viewer will build..." or words to that effect then I would set the record straight if needed.

Attention Alan:

This is the kind of worthless crap that is ruining the forum. What ought to be an enjoyable look at images from a variety of members instead becomes a morass of argumentative garbage dumped into it by the same person - or persons - over and over. Anyone wanting to enjoy the thread for its intended use must dodge mounds of excrement, which makes for a very unpleasant experience.

The intended charter here is about democracy and free speech, but when free speech degenerates into pollution, democracy is not served.

Pease, please, get out your pruning shears and use them. The community here is small enough that I'm sure you can manage it. I only come here infrequently myself and I read more than I contribute, but I will almost certainly stop visiting entirely if this is the way things continue to go.

You are being very selective in who you say contributes to the pollution here.

Are you seriously suggesting that other members here attempting to insult other members here they don't like and moderators at DPReview by calling them "arseholes" and "stupid" is acceptable? Alan (Admin) allows it.

Do you really believe posts like yours above is going to encourage people to come to these forums knowing they will be insulted and abused by certain members here who don't like people who disagree with them?

Of course admin here can run these forums as they like but people are watching and seeing what is going on here and so are forming their own opinions of DPRevived and its admin and members. There have been and still are multiple factors contributing to the reduction in participation on these forums. Blaming just one member is nothing more than someone keeping their head stuck in the sand imo.

There are several threads in the Dumpster where the op is DonaldB and others besides danhasleftforum.

Even when danhasleftforum was absent for a few months participation still dropped dramatically according to the numbers on the Users page here during that period.

Fireplace 33, your images are fine.
A bit of clarification re "the rule." This forum has been running for around fifteen years. When DPR looked like folding, we swapped homes. In the initial few weeks there was quite a bit of confusion relating to the flat view format. It made it difficult to follow conversations. Some contributors were posting several different images in different posts each week. While we were all adjusting to the new format it seemed simpler to limit posts to one image per week. As the quote from Roel says, "re-establishing essays will be a next step." We passed that point long ago and participants here regularly place photo essays for discussion. We'll get around to amending the statement.
Meanwhile, we enjoyed your contribution and would like to see more, individual or series.

Pronouns stand in for nouns to avoid repetition.

Who are the "we" you are referring to when you said "...we enjoyed your contribution and would like to see more, individual or series."

It seems you are attempting to speak on behalf of everyone else here.

You are foolishly assuming everyone enjoys the same images as you do.

Which nouns or nouns in your post is your "we" plural pronoun replacing otherwise it is reasonable for anyone to assume you are attempting to also speak on their behalf.

Agree.
I’ll amend the boilerplate text for next week’s edition in order to welcome essays.

I might also emphasize (even more) the desire to have polite discussions.
Looking at this week’s thread, I notice that the conversation went downhill when it was not about images anymore but about semantic misconceptions about some harmless expressions.

Not all of us are native speakers. Some linguistic tolerance would be nice. Especially when, in essence, it was crystalclear to any reasonable reader what the poster wanted to express and a discussion arose from a deliberately wrong reading of a use of pronouns (and “we” is 1st, not 3rd person plural, BTW)

This is NOT a linguistic forum, but one about images. Picking fights about language or personal idiom is not cool.

Please get a life.
You might enjoy it.

WE wish YOU all the best.

(And I think I can indeed speak for all of us here who are not into pedantic fight-picking.)

Very nice subject telling a powerful story.

But looking at the luminosity histogram it confirms what I initially see in that contrast is low due to a lack of a well defined black point and a well defined white point. Consequently the image lacks "punch" on my screen. I like monochromes or sepias as well but they need to have "punch" for my liking.

Fwiw below is an edited version of your image using a Levels Adjustment Layer to add contrast by defining clear black and white points. I then used a Dodge and Burn Layer (50% gray filled layer in overlay blend mode) to help add some punch especially to the hands, two prisoners and the scene overall.

This version has much more "punch" on my screen.

Amazing juxtaposition of different worlds!! Well seen and photographed 😊

However it lacks a little "pop" on my screen and the bit beneath the railway platform is an annoying eye-magnet for me.

Fwiw, this version adjusting the Levels, Brightness and Contrast with various shades of gray in the layer masks has more noticeable "pop" on my screen which helps to highlight the three different worlds in the scene.

This is the kind of contribution that we like and cherish.
And to be clear : with "we", I mean the people who have been active in this thread for many many years and who have come to expect meaningful peer-to-peer photographic C&C and editing/composition/cropping/shooting suggestions.