Random.Arrangement.Old.Timber

[Karm Redland]

Please feel free to give me your comments on this photo.

[bhurley]

I like this composition; it hangs together well and is nicely balanced with the triangle made by the trees on the right balanced by the heavy mass of rock on the left. It's hard to tell if everything's in sharp focus in the image when looking at it on my screen, but I do think it's key for a relatively abstract image like this to be taken with a small aperture so both the foreground and more distant elements are in focus (though the most distant objects probably don't need to be in focus in this particular image. That probably requires using a tripod, especially in a forest scene like this.

[ronlane]

I really like this picture. Is that a rock face there in the bottom middle third? My eyes are wanting to focus on the background on the line between the bottom right and middle thirds. Very cool.

[Karm Redland]

I agree with you that I think it could be a bit sharper -- I used f 3.3. I should have used a higher f stop.

[bhurley]

Yes, I think if everything's equally in focus it prevents the viewer from deciding that there's a particular subject, which there isn't in this case: the subject is the patterns and shapes in the composition rather than any one particular element.

[Karm Redland]

With your comment you made me realize that many of my photos have no subject. I think of them as holistic scenes -- sometimes pretty, sometimes interesting, etc.

[bhurley]

There's nothing wrong with "no subject." A lot of Elliot Porter's photos were like this (take a look at them online if you're not familiar with them); his photographs were like abstract paintings, not really with any obvious subjects at all, but all about patterns, colors, shapes, and composition. He spent hours composing each image with a view camera and then many more hours printing them with dye transfer.

[Karm Redland]

Thanks for the Elliot Porter tip. Looked briefly at his photos last night. I understand exactly what he's seeing with many of his photographs. I'll study his work in more detail.

[bhurley]

He was a big influence on me when I was in my teens and early 20s and just getting interested in photography. Here are a couple of Porter-inspired photos I took back in the 1980s:



and

[Karm Redland]

Absolutely. Your photos are right-on the Porter mark. A lot of cool, beautiful, wonderful, ugly, degenerate, etc. things get missed because they blend into the larger canvas we see. At least what motivates me to take photos like your illustrations is to try to recover what's been missed by the average person. A couple of days ago I was trying to figure out a shot on this incredible mix of rock, root, and plants when two "serious" photographers (large cameras on tripods) walked by and exchanged pleasantries with me. They were off to shoot some grande vista. Honestly, I don't think they saw the incredible beauty they were passing.