Nobody's Homeby
Ja-9Comment by Paul: Greetings from the Critique Club:
Janine - what a pleasure to be able to offer an extended comment to one of your images. Small payback for the huge commenting commitment you offer to others. Thanks for what you do. It is very significant.
I should begin by 'fessing up and letting you know that I was one of your 4s, I can see I'm below your histogram peak so you can take these views as somewhat atypical of how your image was received more generally.
The image is well constructed: exposure, toning and contrast all serve your image well, as does the composition with the placement of the window in the frame. Although your title invites us to create a story for the image - giving the building a history, the information we have to construct the story is limited - we have no sense of scale, no sense of how this part of the building relates to the rest and noting about the world around it, you as the photographer and thus us as the viewer. In that way, the image is quite abstract, we are left only with form and structure - now that's really interesting isn't bs use the sub-text of the challenge was to create an image that communication light, shade, texture, line and form and I have to admit you've been very successful with that brief. Perhaps a title that invited consideration of the structure, what was there, rather than absent people and a back story would have helped people like me to realise what you were doing.
I don't remember the image in voting which suggest I did a drive by. Perhaps that's the issue.... Picking this up as a critique comment, like the Free Study comment series I do, forces you to stop and think but in general voting, especially in a large challenge, a visual hook to keep people long enough becomes important.
Perhaps that's harder for you to see than for most people, as one of DPC's most prolific commenters you find the time to look and comment to a much much greater extent that the rest of us. Given that you probably never do drive-by voting yourself, perhaps you don't construct images as cynically as some others - I resort to gas masks and naked models on occasion and there is a part of me that knows that such provocation at least buys me the time of the drive-by voter... Perhaps they'll then notice the light, the toning and the story....
Here then, you've made an image that meets the brief to a greater extent than most in the challenge, including my own ribboning image but it isn't one that has kept people long enough to appreciate it. I see you got two comments... I also notice that neither voted.
Anyway, I hope my words offer some insight into how voters received your image, though as I said at the beginning, I've been harsher than most.
Best regards
Paul
Photographer found comment helpful.
