- - - -
by krnodil

Comment:
This is strange. It's a sweet stripe, rather than sweet spot. Reminds me of the aftermath of a bush fire. Have you seen Sue Robertson's Fire Tree portfolio? I think it's very much like your own work. She has your eye. Or you have hers. One of those.

wink
by krnodil

Comment:
Oh, you silly thing.
;-)

Abbazia di Sant'Antimo
by Gordon

Comment:
1112/1113. It's really quite pitiful. Fortunately, you don't care at all about that.

card lock
by zeuszen

Comment:

Originally posted by ubique: This is remarkable. Your title explains its provenance, but even so it is still a very interesting study of the margins of art and technology. In this photograph, those margins overlap. Shapes and tones and spatial relationships that are aesthetically pleasing, and yet they have a technological purpose independent of all that. I wonder how this fits with the idea that beauty is aptness to purpose? Surely here, the beauty and the purpose are not connected at all? Hopefully zeuszen might comment on this, and help me out. Meantime, its a 9.

Oh dear, don't I feel silly now? Still, you might still comment anyway I suppose.

cue
by nixter

Comment:
Oh, this is remarkable. So I'll remark ... it's wonderfully multi-layered in terms of street stuff. The unwitting parody, the perfect title that came as a no-cost extra, and look his suit! It's beautiful! He's dressed better than the gals in the window. And on top of everything, he appears as an actor, standing right on his mark, just waiting for his spotlight and ... his cue. Too damn good.

Banff Leaves
by spockling

Comment:
It's a very interesting image to enter in a 'hidden gem' challenge, because you must know that it will be more or less instantly dismissed by nearly everyone. And yet it is one of the very small minority of photographs that actually is a hidden gem. It depicts a hidden gem. A splash of sunlight illuminates these leaves and in doing so also highlights the functional beauty of the forms. Tones, textures and shapes, arrayed here as the notes of a musical phrase on the staff. Considered like that, it's surprisingly lovely, and indeed a hidden gem. 9.

Person on a Bike
by slipintoshadows

Comment:
Of all eleven hundred images, this one is my favorite. It's because you have used the reflection to establish your photograph not as an image of something (a two-dimensional representation of a moment), but instead as a portal, a kind of passport, to the actual, three-dimension experience of the thing itself. A palpable recollection of the real thing.

Let me explain further. René Magritte's most well-known painting is the one of a pipe, with the legend "This is not a pipe" ("Ceci n'est pas une pipe"). It's called The Treachery of Images. His point of course is that the painting is not really a pipe, but merely a picture of a pipe. So far so good?

Now, a direct photograph of a person on a bike is the same; it's an image of the thing, not the actual thing. But this photograph, your photograph, is more than that. It uses another medium, the reflection, to make some magic. So what you have is an image of a puddle (not an actual puddle ... touch it; you won't get wet), but the person on the bike is now real! It's you - or more accurately, it's me ... it's everyone who looks at your photograph who's ever ridden a bike. If we rode a bike by a puddle, and we looked down, this is exactly what we saw. It's the real thing! By showing the person on the bike at one step removed from the literal photograph, you have liberated not just the image, but the viewer.

To me, that's what a camera is ... a wonderful, magical tool used to assay the imagination. Alas, most cameras are wasted on photographers instead.

10. And the small but perfectly proportioned Order of the Thumb:

wistful
by ursula

Comment:
It's the most lovely botanical photograph I've ever seen. If a photograph were a sweet, sad sonnet, this would be the photograph. And this would be the sonnet:

"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end."
- Wm. Shakespeare

10. And old Bill and I both award you the Order of the Thumb:

Follow the Leader
by meo729

Comment:
A bewitching photograph. Laden with metaphor and irresistibly inviting for the viewer as well as for the boys. It's the thing I love the most about photographs; a brilliant image that doesn't look it, doesn't look like a conventional photograph at all. An anti-photography photograph. I think that every adult can look at this and remember the same enchanted moments from their own childhood. The forest may have instead been an alley, or a big park, or some other forbidding place, but the moment was the same as this. From light into darkness, from certainty into doubt, from the familiar world into the unknown; each standing on the courage of his friend. Neither could do it without the other. We still do this, no matter how old we get; it's who we are. And thank Goodness for that. 10. And also the ultimate mark of DPC obscurity, the Order of the Thumb:

Hello Sailor
by MichaelC

Comment:
Wonderful. Photographing people of eccentric appearance is irresistible, but so many photographers, even quite famous ones, seem to seize the opportunity to make exploitative or patronizing images. There's no hint of the 'subject-as-a-curiosity' here. No freak show. Instead it seems to be a moment when this fabulous lady and this photographer met for an instant on equal terms. Not as performer and witness. Not as freak and robber. Just equals. And that's where the immense charm of this portrait comes from; from the rare lack of guile on the part of either party. There's no 'loser' in this moment of engagement; just two winners. 10. And, I'm afraid, the curse of the dreaded Order of the Thumb: