Pictures

[pecunium]

Working on having more photos to display/ready for sale.


So these three are moving from very close, to far away.


Back in March, when the butterfly emerged from her chrysalis I took a lot of photos. This one is iffy. I like the effect, but it's one of those pictures I think falls into the, "photos for photographers" category.



This one, is more in the vein of "easy to get". It stands alone on it's own. No need to really look into it to understand what's going on. I like that it's got all three phases of the blossom cycle (bud, bloom and leaf) for stone fruit. It's one of those photos (unlike the one above) which looks better, in some ways, on paper because the blown out whites will come down. On a textured paper (or a rag), it will have nice detail as well (though color balance becomes a little more critical.



Finanlly this one is problematic. By, and large, it's a snapshot. A moment to remember. It's got potential, there's a lot going on. The general compostion is good, but the light was poor. I had to push the sensor to 1000, and even at that I was on the feathered edge of stable. Yes, 28mm at 1/60th is well inside the rule of thumb (length of lens/shutter speed), but it was cold, and I was getting tired (a little over two miles in to the falls, this was at least half way back. Cloudy and not very warm). The other problem (and you can see it with Sienna's head) is that 1/60th is barely enough to stop motion.

I have no idea who the guy in the middle is, they were just passing through.



There are, as usual, a few more photos in the stream.

Comments

[desert-vixen.livejournal.com]

I like the middle one best, but I like flower shots.

DV

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

How do you feel about flowers with bugs?

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I was admiring these on your flickr stream earlier today. I'd be interested to see the last one either cropped to be just the guy with the dogs--the hat and the diagonals are really nice classic composition elements - or with the folks in the middle taken out, since they look modern and clumsy compared to the more classic guys in the front and the back. (I'm a shameless photoshopper, although my skills are probably not equal to successfully modifying a big chunk of a textural image like this one. Just idle musing!)

The cherry blossoms are great. The butterfly image is fascinating but I think having the antenna as the only part in focus is challenging--the head is probably the strongest positional element and the sharp-focus diagonal antenna leads the eye there, but the soft focus/blur takes away the "pop" that you'd otherwise get from the contrast. And the strong diagonal of the wing, which works well as an abstract, is cut by the antenna. So it's very strong as a documentary image, but maybe less so as an artsy one :)

(Hope you're actually wanting critiques on these, BTW - if not, my apologies!)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Note: when I say the people look clumsy, I don't mean compositionally; I mean the one guy is concentrating on his balance, whereas the front and back guys look like they haven't a care in the world.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Not at all. I don't think there is enough critique on flickr...

I am pleased with the plum blossoms. They are actually a pain to shoot; because the dynamic range of them is so huge (I have to give up shadows, or blow out the highlights).

The butterfly, well that's a little harder. As I said it's one of those pieces that isn't easily apprehended. It's an almost classic example of the style, and the confused points of interest; are typical. The problem is one of establishing context. Keeping all the lines in order, that's gravy.

I'm not sure about the appearance of the middle elements. The body language of the guy in the white pants is one of haste, while the front and back (which are my party)are moving with deliberation (partly because they have animals.

I am a very reluctant photoshopper, and there is no way at all I'd be able to edit them out. There are people who can do it, but I'm not them.

My "artistic philosophy" is to do my best to make the final image look as it was in my head when I tripped the shutter.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Once you start mucking with an image a lot in photoshop, you've really crossed the line into painting - I like to paint so I don't mind taking those liberties, but it stops being photography at a certain point.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Is this the sort of crop you had in mind?

(used two apps to do it. Opened in Lightzone, redid the crop, saved to .tif: Moved to CS2, rezized, dropped to 8-bit and saved as .jpg)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's the one. I really like this (I like the full version too, but it's different in feel). This really brings out the personality of the brown dog. And the hat has personality, too - I think van gogh had that same hat.

[desert-vixen.livejournal.com]

Nice! I got some nice ones at Fort Huachuca with bees in the cactus blossoms.

DV

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Yes, the personality of the dogs come across remarkably well -- Oliver (the brown one) is seeing something he might maul/play with, while Token (the black-and-white one -- more skittish & less exhuberant) is paying close attention to matters-at-hand lest that ripple be dangerous. Good composition in this cropping, and I rather like the way the person's face is obscured by the hat -- it moves the mood from specific to generic, from album-quality snapshot of an individual to art-quality "person with dogs".