Box #4
by blick

Comment:
This is my second favorite this week!! I love it.

pear to pear
by Pingupingu

Comment:
This is my pick to win and my only ten this week! Great set up, lovely composition.

ArchiSquares
by Dallas_TX

Comment:
Is this a building or a showerstall? I like that there is no frame of reference.

lonely road
by imagesloyola

Comment:
Hello from the Critique Club - Sorry I'm late. Life intervened in the form of a sixteen year old son, a stop sign, and the side of my car. Son is fine, car is not.

I'm glad, actually, that I waited to review your photo because in the meantime I have calibrated all the monitors that I use and now your road looks much better. I can see the children in your other two submissions too. I think that many people who vote do not have their gamma thing adjusted and therefore see a photo like this one very dark. There were several comments about it being to dark, which it is not. And while I'm on the subject of voters, remember that this is an amateur bunch. Some do not even own cameras. In your case you lost a lot of points because people couldn't read the sign. If it had been a familiar US roadsign which have standard recognizable shapes it wouldn't have been an issue, but it is in arabic and people wanted to know what it said. We Americans are a narrow minded bunch. We forget the rest of the world exists.

Looks like I have started out with the negative stuff so I"ll continue and then get to the good stuff. Another reason I think you are not gettting the scores you deserve on all three of your previous entries is that they are "too small". You are not taking advantage of the maximum size allowed. I think this is a mistake because you lose a lot of potential for detail if the image appears smaller on my screen. Lonely road is only 328 x 476 pixels when the rules state that you can use anything up to 640. Why not take advantage of the max?

That's the end of my bad comments- just that voters are picky and that pixels are lacking. Now the good comments. This picture is STUNNING!

Lonely Road is a perfect photograph in all respects. Where can I start? It is a masterpiece of composition!. First it is divided into thirds, that magicly pleasing division based on the biology of a humans field of view. The lower third is darker and weights the upper two thirds of sky.

The leading lines of the road go to a vanishing point in another thirds position. All the curved lines lead into the picture, nothing leads out. It feels like a black hole. Even the lines of the clouds are pointing and swirling towards that distant destination. The uprights of the road signs (I don't care what they say) all contrast with the curves of the road, but they, too, tilt slightly inwards as if they are being sucked into the vortex. I love the repeating patterns of the dots and dashes. The dots in the center strip are echoed by the dashes at the edge of the road and again but the concrete barriers which are dashes with dots on top. Lovely. Texture in the foreground smooths out in the background and reappears in the sky.

Black and white is the perfect choice. The grey tones are all muted except for the road sign which stands out by being dark. Nothing is bright white. Nice. Another advantage of chosing black and white is that I think it makes the photo sort of universal. For me, and where I live, I imagine that there is an ocean out to the right, beyond the barriers, and that the buildings on the left are coastal. But I can also imagine how it could be interpreted as snow over there, or sand, or a large lake. No matter what you think you see it is in the "vast nothingness" category, or maybe I mean "vast nature-being-stronger -than-man feeling". The road is clinging to the frontier of overpowering landscape and weather. Just barely holding on, maybe about to be flooded, or blown away. The little human buildings on the left look fragile and temporary. And there is no one there. Lonely lonely. Lonely because there is barely a trace of humans. The road signs and lamp posts don't feel like they were put there by people, they feel like part of the landscare. Only the building looks man made, but maybe deserted. ANd lonely because of the hugeness of the sky and land you show, a person would feel very tiny. Would he even cast a shadow? None of the road posts do.

Techinical stuff? all perfect, perfect focus, perfect lighting, perfect BW balance, perfect post editing (if any, maybe the photo was perfect to begin with), percect focus....um what else is there? I'm sure it is perfect even if I forgot to mention it.

This is a very tight, professional, controlled, planned out photo. Nothing extraneous to the visual or emotional message was included. I hope you continue to submit. The rest of us could learn a lot by studying your images. Next time, please, make the picture bigger. You deserve to win some ribbons here.

Now the disclaimer - remember that this is only my opinion and I am not an expert, far from it.

Message edited by author 2003-02-04 12:05:20.

Cheese and Crackers
by HBunch

Comment:
Hello from the Critique Club -

Okay, I have to start with the most glaring error her and get it out of my way before I can move on. that awful border. With all the arguement about boarders being allowed/banned, here is a perfect example where the border detracted from the photo. I bet you would have scored at least 30 places higher if you hadn't added the border. What's wrong with it? A simple mistake - the color. The yellows in your photo all have a red (orange) cast and the yellow in the border has a green cast, Yuck - clash. When i see a color issue or a brightness issue, I like to look at the photo on several different monitors. On one, the yellow looked like yellow and on three it looked like neon with the greenish slant. Perhaps it looked OK to you. try desaturating all the green and blue. Too many people (me included) marked you down for the border color.

Hmmm ... I better say something nice quick so you'ss keep reading. This photo has a lot of potential but fell short. the idea is good, meets the challenge and all. I like the textures especially. Nice contrast of textures. I love the composition, but do you think it feels crowded? I'd have like to see a little leg room or head room on one of the sides. I think the top would be my choice for a sliver of more background. The compositional lines are lovely, you have a good eye, I've noticed that in your other shots too. Nice diagonals, crackers point to cheese right to left, cheese slice leads the viewer back left to right. makes a circular pattern for the viewer whis is very pleasing. The repeating lines are great too, the lines in the piles of crackers are viaually interesting.

So composition is your strong suit, it seems to come naturally to you. Some other stuff needs work. Is anything in focus here? I would have preferred a nice sharp focus to emphasize the play of textures that you have set up.

Given your natural artistic eye, I'm wondering if the other flaws here could be as simple as a monitor calibration problem. You say you adjusted your colors in post processing. But to me everything is too light and the colors are not bright enough, they look deliberately washed out. Did they look better on your computer? Cheese and crackers are pale enough without making the photo too light in addition. The natural color wou;ld have been effective. And that blankety blank border - how did that look to you? Is it a glaringly bright and mis matched?

Just for the sake of arguement I think you should go back to this photo and fix it. Give it a different border and boost those colors. (Don't change the whote balance, you got that on the money.). hey, then you could reenter it in the Before and After challenge.

Now the disclaimer - remember that this is only one opinion - mine - and I am very far from an expert here. I'm sorry that it was a harsh critique.

Message edited by author 2003-01-31 09:40:53.

At the Corner of Charles and Maple
by karmat

Comment:
Hello from the Critique Club (again).

Good find! You just came accross these road signs? No vandalism was involved I assume. I suppose anyone could have stumbled upon a broken road sign but what you chose to do with it was really interesting. This is really a great photo!

The point of view here makes a statement. It's almost as if you are trying to put that sign back up. You got down under the sign and took it from just about the angle it was intended to be viewed at. That's what creates the stunning visual contrast. It strengthens your statement that "here is a sign out of place". Great start.

Next you made a wonderful composition out of that sign. The X it forms in the not-quite-center of the photo is a strong arrangement (good thirds). The x shape itself is wonderful because ti creates four visual leading lines. You have chosen to emphasize one and use the other more subtley. Charles is the less dominate line but you have used it to mirror the slant of the hill and the pitch of the background trees. Maple is the dominant line and you have pointed it right at a tree (I think it's an oak). Ah but wait, you did another reverse. you have lighted the less pronounced side of the X to make it stonger and left the stronger side dark so that it doesn't carrry more weigt. Lovely.

More...Now you made use of the word MAPLE by putting two trees in the V under it, one horiaontal, one upright. Nice. And repeated the V in the branching of the tree- nice. I particularly like how you cleaned off the P (middle letter) in the word maple for emphasis, otherwise the word would have beeen too dark and maybe missed.

Colors are natural. Focus and DOF are perfect. Lighting is exquisite, hard to achieve at mid day. Mabe the snow could have been a bit whiter? On my monitor the whole picture is just a hair too dark. And I think it is a bit over sharpened. The words have some jaggies and the background treetops are sparkly. I think that's what dragged you down to 29th place. Could have been higher!

Okay - the usual disclaimer - this is just my opinion, I am not an expert by ANY means.

Message edited by author 2003-01-30 09:41:49.

Sound Works
by Manic

Comment:
Did you know Henry Klaus?

A drop in a cup of Milk.
by SharQ

Comment:
Hello from the Critique Club.

I'm sure you think this photo should have done better so I'll address the scoring issue first. Your score suffered from burn out (does that phrase translate out of English, I wonder). There have been several droplet phots submitted in other challenges in the past. Most recently was a photo called Blueberry splash, which got a ribbon. In this challenge I think I counted six milk splash photos. Even though the photos are randomly sorted for each voter, by the time you get to the third, you begin to get sick of them. Many voters score down for "copy cat" images, so all the splashes were at a disadvantage from the start. So why did yours place last of the spashes?

Your picture is technically excellent. The stop action is perfect, DOF is perfect, focus is perfect, lighting is perfect. But all this doesn't add up to a perfect picture. It lacks human interest. It feels like it belongs in a physics textbook.

The composition is lacking. The crown is placed in the "thirds" position but to me it is too far off center. It is the focal point of the scene, but no compositional elements lead to it or away from it to anything in the rest of the shot. It seems like two thirds of the photo is dead weight. The high droplets are a little interesting and maybe the edge of the cup looks like a planet, but neither have enough draw to justify ther inclusion in the crop. This is a phot that would benefit immensely from a different crop. Try an up and down orientation so you get the sense that the sinker started from above, sunk and splashed the milk up. Try getting rid of the black rim altogether leaving a white on white image like the more sucessful photo of the flower in the milk bath.

Probably this submission would have done better is you had spent as much time polishing it up as you did perfecting the technique. But Hey! Now you are a master at the droplet techinique and you can out splash anyone here next time. Just don't submit a milk splash for a few weeks.

Message edited by author 2003-01-29 18:32:56.

My New Tatoo
by Anachronite

Comment:
This is way way way too dark on my monitor. I think you lost a lot of points for that. Is your monitor calibrated? Mine isn't. But if you get a lot of comments about that perhaps there is a problem. If it had been properly lit I think it would have won. Scout around and look at the image on other peoples computers, it might look darker thatn yours.

signs of sea dogs
by andres

Comment:
This is beautiful. Am I the only ten? I like to go back to my tens (I only give three or four) and see where they place. I hate it when they end up way down here.