Macro mountain: Nooks And Crannies

[JBW]

Macro Mountain ~ Nooks And Crannies: Sony Alpha a68 ~ Tamron 90mm 272E Macro Lens ~ ISO 100 ~Shutter Speed Ten S. ~ F/16 ~ Natural Light ~ Exposure Compensation 0.0

This macro shot is a very small part of a boulder that is about 1 meter high and wide. The boulders at the bottom are, give or take 1mm high.

There are Slime Mold Waterfalls, fallen boulders, cliffs and dangerous paths to traverse. Who knows what lurks under the green canopy.

Brian

[Manfred M]

Brian - Sorry, for me this shot does not work at all.

If you are trying to emulate landscape photography using a micro scene, then you should look at the scene as a landscape photographer would, working with the compositional tools and lighting to lead they viewer's eye through the scene. Most landscapes need a foreground, middle ground and background to be effective. That is certainly missing in this shot.

[JBW]

Brian - Sorry, for me this shot does not work at all.

If you are trying to emulate landscape photography using a micro scene, then you should look at the scene as a landscape photographer would, working with the compositional tools and lighting to lead they viewer's eye through the scene. Most landscapes need a foreground, middle ground and background to be effective. That is certainly missing in this shot.

Okay

[JBW]

Every now and then I revert back to my misspent youth when I was a cheeky little beggar. perhaps the only editing that was needed was to edit the title? Does it work as a Nooks And Crannies shot.

[Manfred M]

Every now and then I revert back to my misspent youth when I was a cheeky little beggar. perhaps the only editing that was needed was to edit the title? Does it work as a Nooks And Crannies shot.

Good try Brian. Changing the title or the genre is not going to turn a so-so image into anything else.

What is the subject / centre of interest in the shot? There is nothing in the image that grabs the viewer's eye. And just because those elements can be found in the image, that doesn't make it a shot that will engage most viewers.


Here's a landscape. Complete with foreground, middle ground and background. It even has a centre of interest. From a technical standpoint, parts of the image that need to be sharp are, there is motion blur that I did on purpose, but is it a good shot? At one point I thought so, but in reality, it's a not particularly interesting at all to most people, even though it has a great deal of meaning to me and my family.

[JBW]

I'm agreeing with you but I'm not at all sure how to get a windmill and a pond built into the boulder. Nevertheless there should be angles and dangles that just mist work.

[Manfred M]

I'm agreeing with you but I'm not at all sure how to get a windmill and a pond built into the boulder. Nevertheless there should be angles and dangles that just mist work.

Perhaps the boulder just is not going to work out as a macro landscape. Tree covered hills and mountains don't make for terribly interesting subjects much of the time either. Here is a shot of tea bushes planted on the sides of a mountain in Tamil Nadu, India. It was taken around mid-day, so the light was awful. This is not a very exciting shot. It has some of the same characteristics of your image.





Here is another shot taken about the same time, this time with a foreground, middle ground and background. Still not a great shot, but it is better than the first one and give the viewer an idea of what the landscape in the area looks like.





Add a tea factory (as a centre of interest) to the scene and the shot becomes far more interesting. This one is reputedly the highest orthodox tea factory in the world.

[JBW]

There you go again, confusing your taste for universal taste. #3 is an interesting shot. But for someone not so enamored with buildings #2 may be more interesting.

I grant you either one is far better than my effort.

[george013]

Brian,
If you want to make suggestive photo's, try another point of view. Find a similar object but then above you so you shoot it as being in it. Google on "mushroom photography" and look at the pictures only. See the difference in experience between a "normal"shot from above and a "special" shot from a lower point of view.
Another interesting photographer is Slinkachu. He changes the experience by adding small figures. Very simple and creative. Google on him. There're also pictures of how he made it showing the ridicule difference in experience when making the frame smaller: not much more.

George

[JBW]

Brian,
If you want to make suggestive photo's, try another point of view. Find a similar object but then above you so you shoot it as being in it. Google on "mushroom photography" and look at the pictures only. See the difference in experience between a "normal"shot from above and a "special" shot from a lower point of view.
Another interesting photographer is Slinkachu. He changes the experience by adding small figures. Very simple and creative. Google on him. There're also pictures of how he made it showing the ridicule difference in experience when making the frame smaller: not much more.

George

I like the mushroom shots, SZlinkachu miniatures with mushrooms could be interesting, thanks

[Manfred M]

There you go again, confusing your taste for universal taste. #3 is an interesting shot. But for someone not so enamored with buildings #2 may be more interesting.

I grant you either one is far better than my effort.

Brian - you misunderstand what I am trying to demonstrate and that is simply elements one should look at when composing an image, especially in terms of what we were looking at; rocks and plants / trees.

Personal taste should not be something we look at when evaluating an image otherwise someone who has a fear of spiders would not give a good assessment of an image with spiders in it. Likewise, someone who has a problem with nudes would have issues when assessing that form of photography.

However, one must remember that when we analyze and evaluate an image, that is personal opinion and while people who have photographic training and background, will often make very similar observations and comments, these are still opinions. Image analysis and evaluation is subjective, so please feel free to disagree with me, but you should be able to articulate why you agree or disagree with the comments.

Just as an aside, from a personal taste standpoint, I prefer the second image to the third as well, but when evaluating the images, I would score the third one slightly higher than the second one.

[JBW]

Brian - you misunderstand what I am trying to demonstrate and that is simply elements one should look at when composing an image, especially in terms of what we were looking at; rocks and plants / trees.

Just as an aside, from a personal taste standpoint, I prefer the second image to the third as well, but when evaluating the images, I would score the third one slightly higher than the second one.

And that's what I don't understand. Howe can you declare something superior that you don't like as much. Photography is as much art as science. Perhaps even more so.

It seems to me that the technique you have been trained in for judging places science above art?

[Cogito]

Brian, in addition to offering debatable shots, maybe you could fix your ident link?

[JBW]

Brian, in addition to offering debatable shots, maybe you could fix your ident link?

If you mean debatable as in deserving of being talked about that's good. If you mean debatable as in this really is just not worth posting here... that's not so good.

I post my best here because I'm proud of what on occasion I can achieve. I post the others so that people such as Manfred can explain to me why from their perspective they don't work. This often, though not always results in new insights for me that go a long way to improve my art.

Thanks for the heads up the link is fixed

[DanK]

I have tried many times to take macro images of things with interesting textures, etc. They have almost all been failures. In fact, this past week, I was walking in a beautiful forest with my wife, and several times, when we stopped to look at some little details, I commented that it was fascinating in the real world but would be entirely boring as a 2-dimensional image.

The reason my tries at this have usually failed is a more general version of Manfred's comment. Having a defined foreground, middle, and background is just one version what a photo needs. Usually, in one form or another, a successful photo needs a central point of interest and a composition that highlights that point and draws the viewer to it. That's what this image lacks--as do most of my tries at similar things.

Brian, you protested that what Manfred suggested is putting science ahead of art. On the contrary. "Rules" of composition were primarily devised by artists. Scientists of several stripes and mathematicians have spent a lot of time trying to describe the patterns underlying them and to understand why these rules work, but they didn't devise them.

At least once a year, I visit the fabulous collection of impressionist paintings in the Clark museum in Williamstown, MA. These are compositions that work. No one has trouble figuring out what the intended points of interest are, and one's eye doesn't wander, trying to find them. Collectively, they don't always follow the rules. Divisions, for example, are often not at the thirds. However, the compositions work.

Similarly, take a look at at Edward Weston's 1937 photo, Tomato Field, Big Sur. You can probably find it online. Most of the image is simply the pattern created by the plants--in principle, similar to what you were trying to do. However, it isn't just the field. A small area at the top, perhaps 15%, is hills and sky in the background. One of the things that makes this one of my favorite photos is that it inverts a common approach to landscapes. The lines formed by the plant are "leading lines" that lead to the hills, but the hills aren't the subject at all; they simply provide a framing that helps make the pattern of the plants stand out even more.

I think this is a particularly difficult genre of macro, precisely because it is so hard to create a central point of interest. I went back alone to the forest I had walked through with my wife, this time with a tripod and macro lens. I tried creating some images of the tiny plants growing out of rotting tree stumps. We shall see. It will be a few weeks before I can process them, but I am not very optimistic.

[JBW]

Dan, I'll look at your suggestions. Manfred is right there is a lot missing in my shot. You too are right, this is a challenging genre of macro. I'll keep working on it and I'm looking forward to seeing your attempts posted.
B.

[Manfred M]

And that's what I don't understand. Howe can you declare something superior that you don't like as much. Photography is as much art as science. Perhaps even more so.

It seems to me that the technique you have been trained in for judging places science above art?

Brian - there are two completely separate issues here where you seem to think there is one.

Liking an image has nothing to do how good it is. Personal taste is just that. Personal likes and dislikes are much the same. What we like and dislike has nothing to do with how good something is, but just our personal taste. A lot of people love Chardonnay wines, but I personally do no like them. Experts tell me that the Baco Noir grape is not particularly sophisticated, but I have had many bottles of that wine that I enjoyed more than ones made of more "noble" grapes.

The same logic goes with photographs. I recently posted this image of my father and my grandson:




It is definitely my favourite picture that I took over a recent two week period. It's not a great shot that I will enter in competitions, but as it features two people who may never meet again, given my father's age, it has a great emotional impact on me and my family.


When it comes to evaluating and judging image, we have to park these emotional issues and look at an image subjectively. Has the photographer executed well (technical issues) given the subject? Has the photographer arranged the elements on the page effectively and in a way that captures and holds the viewer's attention? And finally, has the photographer captured an image that has an emotional impact on the viewer? This could include the mood of the image, the subject matter, the impact it makes on the viewer and how original or imaginative the photographer's approach was in creating the image. No where does like or dislike come into play.

Let me stress, while there is some science and convention associated with evaluating an image; ultimately the view is going to be subjective and the opinion of the reviewer. If you have an image assessed by a number of different experienced reviewers, chances are that they will point out the same positives and negatives in an image. As this is subjective process, personal experience and bias can creep into the evaluation. I have been a judge at a competition where one of the other judges scored an image very highly because of the difficulty in capturing the subject matter. At another one, one of the judges did not like the way that the photographer did not control the model to his satisfaction and scored the image poorly.

Unless you can separate how well an image is made from how well you like it, you will have issues improving your image making as the two are completely independent from each other. You also need to understand that when people critique your work, they are commenting on the image and not making any comments about you personally. I've trained under both the CAPA and PSA systems and while the results can be similar, these two organizations take a completely different view on presenting what is essentially the same information to the photographer; both try to stress that the comments are aboutthe work, not the photographer, but have a different way of doing so.

[JBW]

Manfred, this will seem like a very short reply to your last post but it does seem to sum it all up: You're right and I'll work on it.