Re: A critique suggestion

You, have not popped in lately to say hello on the DPR M43 forum. It is pretty dull there without you.

I've been "soft banned" -- that is, I've been "sandboxed" from posting. And while some mod might let me out, "they" will put me right back in. I've posted about it a few times -- the posts that led to my sandboxing are in this thread. None of my posts were deleted, and nothing I posted in that thread was nearly as bad as what was posted by the mod and the mod's buddy (jalywol). Worse, Mako entered the fray for no reason other than camaraderie with fellow mods (I think we can guess what's being said in their private "mod forum"), 'cause the only other post I made after that, was moved from the Canon R forum to the forum it's currently in, which is about as a dick move as I could imagine. An appeal the the admins led to silence, so I just walked away.

Anyway, no worries. I had been posting less and less at DPR -- just the occasional "flurry of activity", such as the thread that got me sandboxed -- so it came at as good a time as any, I suppose. Also, I've come to realize that facts don't really matter to many, if not most, unless the facts happen to line up with their opinions (which was made eminently clear by the US political situation, and likely elsewhere). Even on this site, I don't post all that much -- just a "flurry of activity" at the moment. I've become quite the misandrist in the past few years, like many others, and it's hard to just ignore it knowing what lies underneath, even if everything's OK on the surface. Maybe time for some shrooms? Or worse, bite the bullet and finally get an account on reddit. 😁

By the way, since this thread is about critiquing, and I'm being salty, let me bridge those discussions with a photo:

Y'all can critique/edit as much as you want. And before any of y'all say to crop like this or that, yes, I did try a 2:1 central crop, and it looked really nice, too. But not better that the photo as is -- just different. But there's all sorts of curve adjustments that could be made, too (although I liked the curves on this out of all the ones I tried). Still, have at it!

I actually got the sandboxing removed. I had written to the Admins a couple of times, with no reply. On the article they made about paid subscriptions. I made a comment saying that the heavy moderation had lost them a lot of members/traffic. One of the top dogs saw it and wrote a PM to say it had been lifted. I stay well away from certain forums, and just post pretty banal stuff.

I post more here actually, as it is nice and relaxed.

til someone actually is correct with there uneducated view eg: when my daughter went to middle school/ high school in one of her maths classes the teacher approced her and said that her way of calculation was not the correct way, well she talked straight back to the teacher and said it was correct. so that night the teacher went home and tried her method came back the next day and said to my daughter she was 100% correct and he had never seen anything like it before. she was 12 and the teacher had 30 years as a maths teacher, she has picked up a few biology teachers over the last 2 years as well.

OK, I'll play.
Tried to get some more detail out of the mound and lightened the foreground, eased the sky a little.

But that's what a good teacher does! I learned short division from a 5th grader, learned a different method of factoring regular trinomials from a student who was taught the method by his gym teacher, etc., etc., etc.. My favorite story is when this one girl asked me how to solve some problem, so I worked it out for her. She looked at it and said, "But couldn't you just do [a shorter, easier, and much quicker way] instead?" I said, "Sure, but what are you going to do with all that extra time you have when you're done?" She just looked at me and flat-out said, "Will it work or not?" I mean, damn! 😁

Well, see, that's the whole point -- if posting on DPR requires me to not correct misinformation because it offends the willfully ignorant, then no. I mean, I know what the mods will say, "It's not what you say, but how you say it and how often you say it." Um, no. Absolutely not. Because they never act on those who are spreading misinformation, only those who are correcting it. It I'm in a tit-for-tat with a willfully ignorant poster, 100% of the time, the mods come down on me, not the other, even when they are the one being abusive. "We've heard it all before and everyone knows -- say it once and be gone" was more or less said to me by Tom Caldwell. Well, no, Tom -- it's pretty obvious that everyone doesn't know, else I'd not be correcting the misinformation, would I?

Mako, unlike TC, does understand the technical, and understands it well. I've seen Mako correct misinformation more than once. We used to get along OK, but that ended in an instant. When the Off Topic forum was a the day, I made a statement about Trump supporters (that they're some combination of racists, misogynists, fascists, ignorant, and/or stupid) that didn't sit well with Mako (pretty sure they're a Trumper). Immediately after that, things went south with regards to anything even outside the Off Topic forum where politics was not discussed. I mean, seriously, how petty was it for Mako to move this post from the Canon R Forum, not even PM me a reason, and I'm sandboxed soon after. That said, I don't think it was Mako who sandboxed me (not that he/she would have been against it, though), I think it was TC after from the other thread -- note his "say it well and say it once" retort, but never once "What GB [and other knowledgeable posters] are telling you is correct, please stop arguing with them".

I like it! Can't say I like it better or worse -- just a different take -- but I liked it enough that I went back and had another go to make it look more like your edit:

I see pros and cons to the different version. I think my original works well because the dark foreground corresponds with the crane boom the best, and the parallel works really well. On the other hand, your version has a more classic look, which I also like a lot. It's just like when I do color and BW versions of photos -- sometimes, I can't choose which I like better, they're just different.

Anyway, thanks again for your edit -- made me think!

For what it's worth, I like GB's final version best.
What's making the shot is the repeating nearly parallel and somewhat converging lines formed by the rails, fence and crane boom that begin with the rail in the bottom left. Then we have a series of vertical lines that also repeat and become smaller, right to left - the fence posts, the crane upright and the power lines. I'd include the shadows as well. All these elements are a similar black in all the versions and it is probably a pure black.
In the last version, while the black of these elements remains the same, the lighter tones behind these blacks clarifies the lines and this better brings out the underlying structure. There are still enough darker tones in the surrounding area to give some drama to the scene.

I like Ron's version much more.

The sky is way too light, especially on the rhs for my liking and Ron's two mounds have more contrast and punch than the mounds in your version.

dont know whats happening at DPR but the last several discussions ive been in and quoted the correct information my posts have been deleted, even posting screen grabs from sony sites 🤨

Just stick to your spider shots and you will be fine.

the sales reps are back in full force again. the other day another complainer that my new sony camera is not charging the battery via usbc, so after 10 posts with no answers i posted that he needs to go into the menu and turn usb charging on as its turned off when you using teather program so it doesnt drain the tablet of laptop battery. not one response and others still conplaining. its happening on multiple threads now and im being acused as being a sony employee 🤣

The thing is, and I really, really, really do wonder about this, is while different people prefer different versions, on average, would any of the versions be more or less "successful" than the others? That is, if a thousand people were shown Version A, another thousand shown Version B, and another thousand shown Version C, and asked to rank the photo on a scale from 1-10, or asked if they would hang it on their wall, or asked how much would they pay for a 20x30 inch framed photo, etc., etc., etc., would the average responses be any more different than the differences if the experiment were repeated ten times with different groups? I'm thinking not. I'm thinking that while any given individual would rate differently, the group average would be more or less the same.

Oh, by the way, perhaps there's a better way to phrase "...Ron's two mounds..." 😁

Is trying to see these as average public what we are about? I think your off the cuff stats and results are probably accurate enough. But are we average public? I'd have thought that we are a group who have made an investment in money and time into photography because it is of particular interest to us. I'd therefore expect that regular participants here would show considerably more discernment in the way they look at images than does the general public.

Fair distinction to make. Honestly, I'm thinking the same -- whether it's general public or photographers. I'm not saying I think the average values would be the same between the general public and photographers (I would think photographers to be far more critical), but I'm thinking that, just as the group averages for the general public would be more or less the same, the group averages for photographers would be more or less the same.

There is one caveat, though: since I expect the group averages of photographers to be lower than the group averages of the general public, the relative variation would be greater, so we'd have to have a lot more more photographers in the groups than the general public to get the same relative variation between groups. It's the same statistical effect as noise in a photo -- the lower the light levels, the greater the relative variance in the signal, thus the more noisy the photo. So, if we were doing group averages of 1000 for the general public, we would need a larger group size (say ten times larger) to get the same relative variation.

Perhaps it's best to illustrate with an example. For the GP (General Public), let's say the average score was a 6 with a standard deviation of 0.2. That means that I would expect that all three photos would get a group average between 5.6 and 6.4 if they were more or less equally "successful". If one of the groups had an average value that was larger or smaller, then that photo was more or less "successful" than the others.

For the PE (photography enthusiasts), let's say the average score was 4 with a standard deviation of 0.4. Then we'd expect that all three photos would get a group average between 2.8 and 5.2 if they were "equally successful", which is quite a range. Thus, we'd have to poll a lot more PE to get the standard deviation down to test my hypothesis.

Sorry for nerding out -- it's not like this experiment would ever be done -- but just to illustrate my point, and I have other interests besides photography. 😉

Again, though, I want to make it clear that I'm simply talking about averages. Just like rush hour traffic, on average, is very orderly, the behavior of any individual driver can vary considerably.

I have a few issues with this.

My wife cannot make a good photograph with her phone or any other camera, and she has no interest in photogrphy. But she has studied art history, as part of her language degree in Italy, and when we went to the National Gallery and the Tate Britain in London, she more or less gave me a guided tour, without reading the labels. When I did performing arts photography, the press office people, and the artists, were never photographers. But being visually literate, were able to pick the best pictures from my contact sheets, even picking out stuff I missed.

People can be visually literate without being artists or photographers. Visit any photo forum and you will see pictures made by people who know all about the gear and post processing, but have not got a clue about how to make a visually competent picture. This goes for a lot of photo forum C&C comment, I see too, made about other peoples pictures.

All of that doesn't mean much unless you define

"..... a visually competent picture....."

because what might be a visually competent image to you might not be to someone else and vice-versa.

Q. Who decides what must be a visually competent picture for everyone.

A. No-one.

Everyone is entitled to determine for themselves what they do and do not see as a visually competent image.

I couldn't agree more. I'm not saying that you have to be a photographer or painter to be visually literate but I'd expect a higher proportion of visually literate in a group of painters or photographers than in a random selection from the general public. I'd also agree that much of what passes for discussion about photography in photo circles is about the tech and isn't related to the image as an image. As I've said before, photographers have much to gain in skills and pleasure in working with images from some time invested in studying painting. Not just painting, there are cross over points in appreciating the arts in general.