Thanks, Mike.
It's a color image. I deliberately did not crop out the yellow dividing stripe in the street. Other "real" objects are simply where they were when the shot was taken. Everything about the image is real, especially its imperative.
Rich
April 9, 2025
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A good series. I think I prefer the last one best, where you can see the expressions on their faces better. The guy with his tongue sticking out shows just how hard they were working :-)
The middle crop shows better just how many riders there are and is also very good. -
You just gotta love the leading line here, because it does not lead our eye in a straight vertical or diagonal, but rather allows the eye to meander through the whole image towards the reward on the horizon.
Only a minority of landscape photographers use vertical orientation regularly in their images. (I am one of them, maybe because I am not really a landscape photographer...) I think it is a underrated technique to bring enormous depth into an image that would look flat and borderline boring in a horizontal orientation.
This is a prime example of how effective the orientation can be to create depth and tension and (yes) a narrative.
Your description is another good factor here. Without it, I could have thought this view was from any small stream leading into a bigger one. The description makes me smell the jodium-infused, seaside salty smell.
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Your use of light and shadows brings out the neo-gothic features expertly.
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A stop sign painted onto heat-cracked tarmac, that could easily be mistaken for the dried-up and cracked mud of a river bed.
There is a big ecological message hidden beneath the surface here, about pollution and the wasting of natural resources (especially water). -
You may consider yourself a person not good at closeups, but you manage to hide that defect very convincingly here.
I think some of the compositions could use just a bit more tension (maybe by daring to use dutch angles a bit more).
But the macro-capabilities are quite good (focus could be a tad deeper on some of them, but at least focus is where you wanted it).
Looking individually, my favourite are the glass-splinter icicles on the turnips and the mustard.
My least favourite is the dewberry, because I feel that you could have separated that better from the background with a slightly different POV. -
You've created quite a uniformity of style and processing here, and it elevates all three images to form a higher ideal together. Like 1+1+1=4.
If you had not told me that this is Gdansk (where I have never been, so far), I would have guessed at Hamburg (Speicherstadt specifically).
The warehouses (Speicher) are very similar.
Goes to show that commerce does not end at borders (and in fact, there was not a border for long periods of time between Hamburg and Gdansk/Danzig).
Thanks for giving me another reason to put Gdansk on our wishlist. -
I sense a conspiracy here to lure me to Poland again.
On our single visit, we visited only the area around Krakow.
Gdansk and Warsowa are on the list.
I like how you illustrated how quickly the weather can turn in a continental climate.