* Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #962 / Revived #182 on 2026 09 23 *

Welcome to the Wednesday Comments and Critique (No Theme & No Brand) 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.

Our tried and tested concept (15 years and running!) is a weekly "peer-to-peer" photo comments & critique encounter, in which you GIVE and RECEIVE.

The idea is simple: you post a photo or photo-based image that you have made and get critique on it. And in return you give other people your honest but constructive opinion of their images.

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 or essay 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 or essay that you have made and would like to get comments on.
An entry can either be a single image or a short essay. With an essay we mean not a collection of random images without any connection, seeking C&C on more than one of them. We mean instead a limited number (3 to 10) of connected images that together try to tell a story, create a fuller picture of a situation, event or location, etc.
• Add a clear title to your post to distinguish your entry.
• Look at the other images/essays 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.
• Please stay on topic, i.e. concentrate on the image and the photographic comments, without getting into politics or other distractions. No non-photographic arguments.

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.

PLEASE NOTE CLEARLY:
Unless the original poster specifically states (for every individual posting offered for C&C) that they do not want their image(s) to be downloaded, altered or reposted, it is understood that within the context of this thread, other participants are free to download and alter the posted image and repost it in a reply for C&C purposes. That reposted image may remain permanently within the week's thread, or you may remove it after a short period of time if you prefer. The downloaded and altered images are not to be used for any other purposes nor uploaded anywhere else than within the context of the C&C in this thread. No copyright disputes here!

Encourage - it is a scary business putting your work up for other people to judge!

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.

Have fun, be respectful and let’s stick together!

POSITANO (almost 360°)

I've been moving/deleting photos, panoramas and video's from my iphone in order to free up some memory.
Copying images to my desktop made me rediscover a lot of impressions and souvenirs from the past 10 years.

Here is, for instance, an image of March 2018.

We were in Campania (Napoli and then down to the Amalfi coast) to celebrate Els' 50th birthday with Italian friends.
One of our stops was the outrageously picturesque coastal town Positano.
I remember we had a room in a hotel a bit up the hill behind the church.

I went down to the pebbly beach early one morning to catch early light crawling over the hilltop onto the village.

But while there, I also made this almost 360° panorama with my iphone (seems like it was the SE model at the time):

Of-fence taken! by simple.joy, on Flickr

I've been experimenting with what is sometimes referred to as "bokeh panorama", which is just like a regular panorama shot, but close-up, so you got a lot out-of-focus and stitching can be quite demanding for the software. So it's not always working like it should, particularly if you add in very old lenses with heavy field curvature... but when it does work out it not only gives you a significantly bigger image/higher resolution but also a wider field of view and in some cases a small taste of what shooting on large format might look like. It's fun, but also kind of saddening to see on what most of us are missing out on by not using that initial (and in some ways vastly superior) type of photography anymore. But I guess there are lots of good practical reasons, why photography evolved in the way it did...

I'll think about this image and panoramas in general in response to simplejoy's panorama

Garden bees with a nice soft bokeh

Panoramas seem quite different to me to photos taken with more regular formats. I don't think about them in the same way.
The extended horizontal shape means, to me anyway and others may not agree, that composition and line, how I feel about focus points and sometimes colour, work differently in panoramas.
I'm always aware when looking at a panorama that at anyone moment there is a lot more that I'm not seeing at anyone moment. Things like "the golden mean" no longer feel as though they apply. It's a more dynamic experience. Kind of like trying to compare experiencing a single photo to a movie.
Roel's image. It's like a series of shots telling about a place but it's one image and we explore it. The beach and waves give lines that direct the eye to the buildings cascading down the hills. The V in the hills gives another attention point. The curve of the beach lets us join a couple of walkers. We are aware of the distortion of the curves. It might not be to everyone’s taste but it doesn’t bother me. It feels like a Picasso portrait where I see more than one side at a time. The use of highlights, the cloud shapes and the bookending of the image as well could be discussed. We feel there are many things to explore here and that's appropriate for the subject.
Simplejoy’s use of panorama is quite different. There is a considerably larger area of out of focus green than might have been shown in a regular image. A relatively very small area of the image is in sharp focus and it also stands out because of the quite different splash of warm colour and by breaking the usual rules and being positioned near the centre. The teeth of broken wood inescapably thrust out at us. A subject, focus point , is made, so to speak. In this image, the panorama emphasises the uniqueness of the points of the timber edge. Attention is drawn to a small feature that is isolated from the its considerable surrounds.The panorama treatment makes the scale of the comparison considerably greater. Placing it close to the centre makes it clearer that this edge is surrounded by the living, overgrown vegetation.
A few weeks ago I was discussing Nolan’s film, The Odyssey with a friend. I had just seen it in the widescreen , rather than Imax version. I was disappointed with the visuals. In shot after shot they didn’t seem to me to work. The conversion to widescreen truncated vertical lines. Example. The shot where the gates of Troy open and Agamemnon is standing outside. The power of the shot is lost as our eye searches the somewhat inconsequential detail to the sides of the gates. It’s a shot that needs a squarer format to emphasise the line and power in the man and the lighting of the helmet. It is not a shot for a panorama treatment.

The satin bower bird.
Taken at Lamington National Park. Queensland
There's a message here.

The performance stage

Lures, bribes and promises.

The guilty party. Male.

This is a stage, not a nest. The male satin bower bird takes no part in raising the young.

Panoramic view of Istanbul from Topkapi palace.

Very good detail and indeed nice and smooth background with a beautiful variety of colors.

They're awesome creatures. I'm continually amazed that even now, when not much is still blooming and it's getting quite cold in the nights, they're busy around everything they can find and don't let up. Worker bees really seem to live up to their reputation.

Very nice shot! I like the composition and it looks like an interesting and busy city... I'm sure it is! Too many big flags though for my taste.

I think I should have added a bit more at the edges or cropped out a bit more.

It seems like although this is the "No Theme" thread, I inadvertently and unintentionally, got a theme rolling here, of ultra wide panoramas.
(Chuckle)
I'll comment when the thread is a bit further ahead (and I have more time).

Doors of Durin

J.R.R.Tolkien created one of the most famous Fantasy novels and in doing so he created an entire fantasy world with its own history, lore, geography, places and even languages. But was it entirely fantasy? His fantasy world was influenced by things he had seen and experienced. His interest in language was triggered as a boy, seeing coal trains from the South Wales coalfields and the names and phrases on the sides of the trucks written in Welsh, a language he could not understand and bearing no resemblance to English, and which inspired his Dwarf language. The landscape of the evil land of Mordor came from his experience atthe Battle of the Somme in the First World War.
It is often cited, that his inspiration for the Doors of Durin, the entrance to Moria, the underworld realm of the Dwarves, came from the North Door of St. Edward‘s church in Stow-on-the-Wold, where we are currently spending a couple of nights. Photographed just after sunset this evening.

This gets complex. The following is a continuation of my previous thoughts on discussing panoramas with some additional thinks on Roel's image.
One of the issues with panoramas is uneven exposure. In Roel's shot the technical problem almost becomes a positive as the blobs of exposure variation mesh with the hill peaks. The bright area on the RHS is a negative because it draws the eye away to an area that has no importance in the overall image. Something similar happens with the Sagittarius image with the exposure transition from left to right. Sometimes this happens when stitching images where the camera used different exposure for the different images that were combined in the shot. In this image I feel that the sweep of the bridge the curve of the wake of the closest ferry and the curve of the foreground and harbour on the left are the strengths of the photo and would warrant a panorama on their own. The bright area taking up about 1/3 of the image on the right, takes attention from the 2/3 on the left. I'd suggest cropping this third off and readjusting the exposure.
Exposure control in panoramas, whether done with one constant exposure or multiple varying exposures with software correction, is tricky and one of the areas where panorama discussion differs from regular format discussion.

I have my doubts about whether what you’ve initiated works well for digital viewing.
As large-format prints, they might well be impressive.
At a size that fits on a screen, however, the photos are too small.
Yet, at 100% scale, they reveal all the flaws that wouldn't be visible in a print.