* Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #828 / Revived #048 on 2024 02 28 *

The bigger I viewed this, the better it got. The rain became more apparent with each enlargement. The screen of vertical lines repeats the verticals of the grasses. Your shutter speed and exposure settings get it just right. The horizontal slash of the lake breaks up the greens while giving the grass edges a background that picks them out. It also creates a gently inverted V that connects the background central dark trees to the mid ground and helps unify the picture.
A very satisfying image.

Unusually, I don't see this the same minniev although I agree that it is a wonderful image. At first I smile at the promenade, then it becomes sinister. Do we really want this development? I note the cable truck. The roll out is underway.
Lots of horizontal lines link the ducks, the sign and the landscape. Their futures are locked together.

Good question Pete. I thought much the same and came to similar conclusions. I still don't like the size of the dark blob at the top and I think it ditracs a bit too much. Even so, I think the image gets away with it because the background is very symmetrical. Vertical Symmetry is provided by the large white patch on which the subject stands and so we don't mind the shape at the top too much.

After that, I got interested in the film. I used to use HP4 a lot and, if I remember correctly, I developed it in Microphen. I would have shot and developed using this combination way more than any other film I ever used. Coincidentally, I have just been working on an old B&W HP4 photo of mine I took over 55 years ago. I might post it here in a few weeks.
Then I became even more curious. It's a 35mm image, not a 2 1/4 square. I suspect that this is either a recent photo of an old photo or it is quite a recent photo. C'mon Open Cube, tell us and then I'll tell y'all why I think this.

Edit edit etc because I think minniev has done quite a lot of PP here. And it has been worth it. I'm guessing. minniev, did those foreground leaves get some extra attention? Did you have Escher's Three Worlds in mind? If not, check it
s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/ea/2e/de/ea2ede67edc615e6470a046cb0ee25a3.jpg

It is quite magnificent. Framing, exposure, control of dof, toning. It would be criminal not to do this as a large print.

I took the photo last year with a Hasselblad H2 with the hp film on the frame.

I can't say anything too deep on the image as one of my biggest problems in trying to be a better photographer is having forethought into what I do. I tend to simply capture what is.

Personality gets everyone farther than it should, and when a photo has captured some, that 1000 word quota that makes a good picture is immediately filled, which distracts from minor imperfections.

Hi Rich,

I respect your thoughts.
I really do.
And I agree with the general principle.

I am totally in favour of images with emotional impact and in discussions that explore, deeply, that emotional impact.

I don’t shy away from geipolitics. I have made and shared images from Auschwitz, Oranienburg, Breendonk, China, Lybia, Lebanon, Cuba etc to name but a few. Most of those images were not “neutral”: they included an implied opinion on the subject, for the viewer to discover and to agree with or reject.

And I have always welcomed and respected images and responses that touch (raw) nerves.

But the question was always: what does this image say about the issue? What does the image add to the narrative?

The photography forum is less a place for discussions about the issue or the narrative themselves.

And as soon as a discussion devolves into yes/no or black/white about a theme without further link to the image that sparked the exchange, such discussion no longer has a place in a forum or thread focused on and dedicated to image C&C.

I can see the suggested crop would work but I'd prefer to leave the "gold package" as is. It adds a marker of social division with the hooded man on the steps. The large peeling poster becomes a "slash" separating the two worlds.

"There Will Always Be A New King"

Some photos evoke powerful feelings, and monuments are some of the most evocative. This monument delivers a heavy dose of emotion, like the art work at Whitney plantation commemorating the lives of the people who were enslaved there. It's a beautiful though troubling monument, well conceived for the place it is installed (Florida). You've presented it well. I wonder if the closeup version might be even more effective in monochrome.

Well this is one that grabs our attention. It's well composed, well taken, and the color treatment, which features only a few areas of the surreal colors you fish out of your images, enhances interest. I am curious if it is a found or created scene. It doesn't have any bearing on my opinion of the image, it's just a function of my normal curiosity about how we find and create the things we photograph.

Michael Jackson?? Interesting artistic image. Again, I'm so curious about what it really is, and whether a human face has anything to do with what you photographed, and whether you had this in mind as an end point, or simply found it during experimentation. See, I always have so many questions...

Thanks Chris. I'll have to tell the "funny" part! I don't mind editing the heck out of any picture and am proud of it when I get what I want from it but this thing only has a light treatment of toning. The edit/edit/edit notations are because my favorite plugin for color adjustment is an ancient and never popular Topaz plugin named Restyle that I refuse to give up, and because it's obsolete it crashes multiple times whenever I use it, tossing an additional TIFF into LR that's the same as the original. The "edit" suffixes are how many times I loaded the darned plugin before it worked. If anyone has any ideas how I could force this old program to work better on a new mac, please share! There has never been anything else quite like it so I refuse to give it up.

Thanks Pete for noticing the "peeping" effect which I always like in this spot on the bridge, in any season.

Love your photo. It looks so much like "my" swamp. The cypress and Tupelo were about evenly split in my swamp till the wretched derecho two winters ago that killed so many trees. The cypress were the hardest hit, and the Tupelo's are becoming dominant (I think they grow faster).

Thank you so much, Mike. See my answer to Chris for an explanation for all the "edit" notations. I cannot claim to have done any fancy editing on this one. Just toned it and straightened the verticals as much as was feasible. All those "edits" make it look like I worked a lot harder than I did! I love that image you linked, and had not seen it before. Those light colored patches are conglomerations of tiny leaves of a water plant that thrives in the swamp, and will cover it entirely during summer. Swamps are full of visual trickery, because of the utterly still reflections and the distorted shapes of the things that grow there. It is easy to get disoriented in a swamp you don't know, which is part of the reason many people feel they are too creepy to go into.

To me this is a wonderful capture in many ways.

The subject is sharp, has well defined contrast and the separation from the slightly oof background with lower contrast is spot on. The separation creates a depth we would normally only see in a 3D viewing device, where we feel we could enter the scene and move around within it. Very good composition all round.

The subject himself has confidence and shows one comfortable with his place, within the struggles he and his fellow people have endured. A slight challenge in his eyes maybe asking, could you deal with that?

I do wonder about the object that appears to extend above the sculptures. Was it part of the sculpture, the base of a fountain, a manicured tree behind, a mushroom cloud intended for effect? I did a google search to see if I could find the scene but came up blank. Is the location still as in the photo? I would love to see it in streetview.

Found.

What gave it away?

Do you ever feel like your images are trying to show abstract, as if painted with a palette knife? Textured? I always feel like these abstracts are looking for texture.

It's very hard to explain, to myself or anyone else, why I like this so much.
In no order.
The audacity of the shot. Seeing something where there appears to be nothing worth seeing.
The combination of movement and balance achieved with the mix of diagonal with vertical and horizontal lines.
The B&W tone range.

I can imagine this in the classic slim edge, black wooden frame of a gallery. It's the kind of relooking at the everyday that the photographers of the 1920s delighted in.
Excellent. Plus a general note. Lots of very good images this week. Congrats everyone.

I decided that this had to be a recent photo after studying the fine print embedded at the top of the photo, in reverse. I think that is the F stop and shutter speed recorded. You would need a recent camera with electronics to record that info and put it with the image on the negative.

It's a toss up as to which I like best, the caption or the photo? LOL when I made the connection between the two. Fascinating detail on the cogs.
Lots of applause for seeing the potential in the blue/bronze colour combination. More applause for the positioningh two pieces so that the diagonal gives visual movement.
One of your very best.