Context

[pecunium]

This is a detail shot of a statue of Тарас Г Шевченко in Kiev.

I worked to get the halo effect of the clouds right behind his head. In this shot it looks almost effortless. But that's a function of cropping. In it's entirety the shot is...




The hard part (such as it was hard) was making sure the full frame would be decent, and waiting for the passers by (of a late evening in July) to not be blocking the foreground. The woman sitting on the pediment was a nice grace note. The greying of the lower clouds, and the winking of the windows was something I couldn't avoid. The same light which made the upper clouds so brilliant, was the painful blow-out of the windows.

I'll have to find the prints of the photos I took of the statue dedicated to him in L'viv. He sits in front of a rising wave of, for want of a better term, thoughts, littered with the bits and pieces of his stories.

Comments

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

There will be people voting this year who won't remember why it might seem odd for somebody such as yourself to be taking photographs in Kiev.

I wonder what the issues will be when somebody born this year first goes to vote.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Kiev wasn't the strange thing to me. It was in 95, when I was at Yavor'iv Polygon (the Ft. Irwin of Ukraine), riding around in a BTR-80.

I was thinking... "this thing was designed to kill me.

It's one of the wonerful quirks of being a soldier, I have lots of friends, who might, at a moment's notice, be trying to kill me tomorrow.

And it damages our friendship not at all.

TK

[yuripup.livejournal.com]

Ahh the poet of Ukraine. Taras Shevchenko in English. There is a Ukrainian soccer player, same last name, of some note.

Very impressive shot.

Would you lighten the detail shot, if were you going to show it separately?

And...I am surprised I can't find a copy of Hamaliia in English on the web. Not sure that his poetry translates well into English if you haven't read (or at least heard it) in Ukrainian.x

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I'd have to do another test print. The matte finish is a little dark in the face (and the contrast of face and cloud is pretty stark), so for that paper, yes, I'd have to lighten the statue some.

I've not printed it onto a gloss finish, but probably I'd do the same. It's a little easier to see in the backlighting of the computer screen.

But I do like the brooding effect the contrast gives it.

Translation... well it's an art, and poetry is so hard to do.

TK

[slave2tehtink.livejournal.com]

Speaking from a purely untrained perspective, I actually like the uncropped version more than the cropped, and if I had cropped it probably would have pulled out slightly so that the whole body of the statue was in the shot. The contrast between darker & lighter clouds very much adds to the halo effect, something you don't get in the tight-in crop.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

There is no correctness to the "trained persepective" (in part because all forms have schools, trends, grammars, icons and iconoclasts). I panned a picture the other day because of "flaws," it had as a photograph.

But it wasn't a photograph, it was a piece of Second Life. One of the things I said to the artist was that my lack of familiarity with SL probably shaped much of my interpretation.

When it comes to editing choices, like this one, there isn't really a "right" choice. There are just different choices. Having seen your work, I don't think you need to apologise for your perspective.

I like both of them. I like the scale of the second one. The person in the foreground is just enough to give it life, and the rising waves of cloud, ending in the pure white of the halo is really effective.

But it's not intimate. it doesn't show the humanity of the statue, and that humanity is no small part of what makes Schevchenko's work so good. I don't think that aspect of the idea is conveyed in the wider shot.

Happily, I have both, so everyone can be pleased.

Thanks for the feedback, I don't get as much as I'd like.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

So, I went and diddled it some, to lighten the face.



TK

[yuripup.livejournal.com]

I think that works better. Still looks broody..or maybe even broodier, because you can pick out the details of his broody mustache.

I have a book on my shelf with a translation of Hamaliia in it. Nothing like rousing poem about freedom an a raid on Istanbul.

[feonixrift.livejournal.com]

I like that better. The green shades are pleasant, and the contrast makes his expression more readable.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Yes, they are three different photographs, and (like tribal lays) every one of them is right.

In the distant-view one I see only a figure of someone who is presumably deserving of a Memorial.

In the first (darker) close-up, I see a person who seems to be glaring at the viewer.

In the lighter close-up, he's reflecting or pondering upon something. I happen to like this one best.

(And I marvel at this new Technology that permits such extreme enlargement without apparent grain or obvious loss of sharpness. If I weren't aware of your wet darkroom experience I'd mutter something about how you young whippersnappers don't realize....)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

The grain issues are less evident. In some respects the modern images are less interesting to work with for that. I can get my images up to about 14 x 20, which is about the same ratio of enlargement as I can do with a perfectly exposed frame of 35mm film (which maxes out about 16 x 24, but has a larger image area in comparison to the "standard" digital sensor. If/when I get a D3 we'll see what the full-frame sensor can do).

But when an image is noisy... ooh that's harder to deal with than grain ever was.

Other flaws, such as not quite being on, for focus, are fixable, in ways the darkroom never allows.

This image



Wasn't all I hoped for, because the bird wasn't, quite, in the plane of acceptable focus. But, a little wizardry, and I have something which I don't have to be ashamed of showing, at sizes up to about 6 inches.

TK