Dead End
by jjbeguin

Comment:
Oh - I was getting fed up with too many nonsense shots in this challenge, but this I like. It has a 60's filmic quality that is very well done, and a sense of the (extra)ordinary that sits very well with me. The sparrows add a near-surreal touch. what, by orthodix thinking, ought to be very poor light, wrks well to flatten and geometricise the scene, and there's a certain balance to the compositional weight that pleases me. Nice work

Slow, but certain dead end
by samanwar

Comment:
Yep - to live is to die. I find the processing enormously overdone here. Composition is fine, in a kind of stock manner, and the smoke is well brought out.

Dead End?
by garlic

Comment:
In the same way I fail to understand people who think The Exorcist is the greatest film ever made, I fail to understand the near-obsession around here lately with this kind of mock-gothic type of stuff. I find it hard to believe that this has anything to do with the world in which any of us lives, and fail not least on those grounds to find anything very interesting in it. There is abundant and evident skill in this work - technical savvy, fine execution, mood, detail, off-beat but happy composition. but I wish that could be brought to a more grown-up ambition that these neo-baroque fantasies. I'm sorry, but it angers me to see such ability harnessed to such work.

Shock of the New
by Imagineer

Comment:
Just having a wander around the site, and found this. So belatedly, congratulations on your third (though there's more yellow about your second, contrarily), and congratulations on the tonality of this shot also, which is masterful. I hope you're all happy and healthy.

A Long Road To Here.
by Pedro

Comment:
I've come back to this shot a few times now: it has a relentlessness that I really like P. The fractional inclusion of the house is great - it took me a while to really sense that, but after some thought it really works - I think anything more prominent would be too easy and therefore less apt. Very communicative - there's a strong sense of ... well, maybe not pride exactly, but perhaps of challenge - like 'yeah, I know, you're thinking about my chair. ever thought about me?' kind of thing. Whatever; it's a proper portrait.

dumbo
by misterjosh

Comment:
This has major potential, I think. There are photographs by Andre Kertesz from the time he spent in New York (an unhappy decade for him, really) that use just such a technique of refelctions in puddles to break the sense of the ordinary in his images. I hate the comments I recieve suggesting different framing of my photos, and usually hate to make such comments, but in this case I think my feeling is so strong I must do so: you don't need to see the 'real bridge' in this shot. Did you try a horozontal framing, from maybe a step to the right, to play on the contrast beteen the tarmac and the cobbles and the water (especially the cobbles disappearing into the water), and to frame the refelcted support of the bridge more fully in the water? Whilst I think I understand the more purely documentary approach you've taken, I do think the reflection is so understated here that it was never going to succeed score-wise.

However; just as others have said, what's important is what you are trying to communicate.

Fallen Leaves
by e301

Comment:
Now this is an enormous and very flattering surprise. Thanks to all. Backstory to follow ...

Message edited by author 2005-10-26 06:23:28.

Unbound
by Skip

Comment:
Delighted to see your name on the front page - way overdue. Many congratulations my friend.

Branch Intruder
by davidus428

Comment:
from the Critique Club

I also wish the depth of field might have been pushed a touch further - it seems to me that the magic in such mega-close photography doesn't really reside in the artistic effects of shallow depth of field. Even without the ant, you might have had a quite magical image here.

For me, it's glory lies in in your chosen composition of the angles of stem and leaf, and in the scattering, the feeding of the aphids. I could not pretend to be moved, atristically by this photo, but sure as hell my scientific curiosity is engaged. I like our thoght processes too. for a successful portrayal of those thoughts I think you'd need o catch the ant in plainer view, perhaps even taking one of those sacs of fluid - however difficult that achievement is, photography of the natural world surely depends upon a patience beyond that the rest of us have to put out.

The light is handled very well, which is a strong point here. As to all those 'eww' comments ...

New Branches from nothing
by okiesisi

Comment:
From the Critique Club

I think you have the beginnings of an idea here - in fact, I spent some part of the very littel time I had around this challenge trying to get something similar, though with branches coming out of walls. So the basis of the shot is, I think, a winner. One could nit-pick about whether or not those shoots constitute a branch, but I think that's best left to the dictionary-obsessives that lurk around the challenge description page.

I can't say you've even begun to suceed with the shot, however. The placing of the shoots in frame is the only point in this shot's favour; at least you've avoided the dead-centre madness. First rreactions are important, not only here where the voting is generally so very fast, and the first impression here is that the shoots are out of foucs. My next thought is - why? And I can't, however I stretch my mind, find a reason for that, artistically. That feeling is only slightly relieved by the follow-up observation that it would be difficult to declare that the ground is focus either.

It's difficult to say much more - it has a quality of anti-photography about it - in that it's actually quite difficult to bring one's attention to the plant, and prevent the eye from drifting through the melancholy of the detritus that surrounds it: one os constantly drawn to the colour, and thrown off by the impossibility of finding a place to fix the eye. In that sense it has a form of message - but the lack of apparent control in the tonality and exposure of the background, and the way the fine detial is absent throughout, makes it hard to believe that's a deliberate choice.