* Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #859 / Revived #079 on 2024 10 02 *

Thanks for an interesting conversation and I hope we can pursue it despite the limitations of flat view. We all bring whatever we have to our assessments of images (our own and others'): our preferences, our visual perception, our experiences, our prejudices, our practices, our formal and informal learning. Then we try to apply that with our own unique thought process and express it in our own language and vocabulary, sometimes through the filter of a second language.No wonder we don't agree! In a recent thread on the main board there was an interesting discussion centered around what was or was not a photograph, and there was no consensus.

I agree that the capture is already an abstraction, a result of the workings of the camera and the settings. I feel quite free to use any means in camera and in post to do whatever I want to it. I feel no loyalty to the capture itself. (Many would disagree). They are my pixels now. I still tend to judge the end results of my own or other's images by whether I like them or not. My biggest visual bias is incoherent color, and my biggest content bias is story: I like images with coherent color that I can find a story in, biases that make me particularly weak with altered colors, portraits, abstracts and photos of art objects.

One of the reasons I am a zealous participant here is that the discipline of looking at and thinking about images other people make and considering my own reaction to them helps me not get so stuck in my own box. Finding out what others think of my images gives me a broader view of them, for better or worse. Nothing makes me happier than somebody finding a story I hadn't thought of in something I post.

Re your forest image: adding to my response - Once I won a contest with one that had a similar effect, but had converted to monochrome. In the recent Edit-me-an-image thread where I shared one with a prominent sun flare, the winner was a monochrome conversion. Maybe monochrome helps make visual sense of the phenomenon? I keep right on taking photos into the sun...I bet you do too!

Thank you minniev.

No worries, but question what I say as well.

That’s all we can do, just helps if you understand your viewer is doing the same.

Even if we all view the same event, we never all see it from the same place, never have exactly the same memories, same emotional attachemnt, etc.
When we make a photograph the camera often abstracts parts, they don’t fit our imprecise memory, they don’t fit our sense of photographic order, so we alter them until they do. What you do essentially is resolve conflicts in the image in line with your memory, imprecise as it is. :-)

Everybody does this, we resolve conflicts in the image, and we do so from our own memory and experience. And right there we add things from our memory and experience to an image, and emotion is attached to our memory, not the photographers. If you go correcting all the ambiguity and fill it with your absolute then it has less attachment to your viewer. Not to say that our logic is always rational, often it is so coloured by confirmation bias that we often make the image more irrational and abstracted without noticing.

Know what you mean, especially about coherent colour though I struggle with it. Think it needs to be underlying in the image much like the light needs to be there with film photos, you can't edit it in. Though you certainly can edit it out! :-) I'm at a stage where I'm deliberately trying to introduce an abstract, something beyond my control. Bit like Dylan's songwriting, rather than make sure everything is grammatically correct and follows the exact pronunciation and meaning I define, I tend to start swapping words around randomly just to see what happens. Doesn't always work, but breaks you out of a pattern rather than reinforcing it.

And winners on photo forums tend to be the ones that have correct histograms and reveal the most detail… Or are in line with the understanding of the viewer. Not that this is wrong, just need to understand your audience.

Just back from a friends anniversary party and am about to have that extra slurp that will render me even more incoherent (I took the bottle home, nice claret).

He is photographing the stack.
And “he” is the son of a niece of my wife.
We met him (and his girlfriend) by total coincidence while they were backpacking in Albania. Go figure!

Agree!

Sorry for not commenting this week.
Albania is too engrossing to spend time online (and connection is iffy).
Besides, on a phone our conversations are harder to follow.
They seem interesting though.
And many good images.

Norway afloat and some practice editing.

Nice scene but your practice edit seems to have washed out the clouds and water to some extent.

I see a very faint blue patch in the sky to the right and I assume it was a much stronger blue sky at the time. Maybe I'm wrong?

In any case it seems you applied a lot of jpeg compression when saving the image because I don't have to darken the highlights much at all before noticeable banding appears in the sky.

If you would like some help with post processing, a link to the raw file would help significantly.

I had a bit of a tinker with the jpeg but its high compression limits what can be done with the highlights in terms of bringing out more detail in the clouds/sky and water.

As always, just some food for thought 😊

The split background is a distraction for me especially because the boundary passes behind the lower part of the head.

Imo the image would be better if the nicely blurred grass in the background was cloned to fill the entire background.

Making an accurate selection around the feathers would be fiddly, even with the Refine Edge Brush so I'm not going to spend time doing that.

Just some food for thought.

That is not even close to being true.

You could have a nice looking flower with some foliage or whatever in the not to distant background.

For a realistic image you could select a small aperture to give a large DOF and so get just about everything acceptably sharp.

For an artistic effect you set a very large aperture, enough to keep the flower sharp with the foliage in the background completely blurred out to separate the subject from the background.

Or you could set an in between aperture to still keep the flower sharp with the background somewhere between completely blurred out and acceptably sharp.

Not really. We tend to try and view, and make sense of, images as a cohesive whole because that is the way we see and make sense of the world. We use the only tool we possess to decide if that is realistic; our human experience and memory which is often flawed and always incomplete.

Purely hypothetically:

The problem of trying to create a rationale as to how images work is confirmation bias, we all want to believe there is value in our images. And so we can start using our knowledge of images work to confirm this; this line leads the eye here, the brighter area attracts attention, the colour grading suggests brightness, etc. Rather than opening out your vision to be more objective you can sometimes get caught in the trap where you are actually training your vision to reinforce the ideas you wish to believe. Proving the rationale correct becomes the object rather than developing a more objective understanding. And the harder you look the more your understanding seems to make sense. It really can be quite surprising just how wacky this can get.

We'll just have to disagree on this one 🙂

Very nice shot and well spotted.

I too like the juxtaposition with the blue water but I feel it would benefit from a tighter crop to highlight the dragonfly and its relationship with the water more strongly.

Maybe something like this?

Thank you for looking and commenting. I will take your suggestion under advisement. Thank you for not editing, I forgot to put a note.

No problem.

More often than not I find that posting a suggested edit helps show to image owner more clearly what I mean in addition to any written suggestion.

I get and understand why some members prefer their images to not be edited so I have no issue abiding by any "Please do not edit this image" requests.

The original image has the sky over exposed, it was metered off the trees. It was 100% overcast with some variation in darkness.
I was shooting 1 stop brackets, but I didn't for this one.
I tried to bring some sky and the mountain back by reducing it's exposure 1 stop.
I also gradient warmed the image and I enhanced the blue tint of the sky mask. I think that's why that part of clouds looks blue.
The image was already red and blue-ish naturally. I thought it would look more interedting with a orange and a blue tone.

The original is 60mp, I compressed it to 2ish so I'm not posting so many huge files. I'll try something less compressed next time.

ok, no problem.

If it was my image, I would have no hesitation in replacing the sky with a similar looking overcast sky. In this scene it would be quick and simple to do.

The highlights might be affected by the texture layer and the blend mode minniev used.

Some stunning effects can be created with the blend mode options.

For goodness sake, there is no cliff. That's just the STEPS! The drop of the steps ranges from 12 inches in the middle to 4 feet on the ends.

Here's an unedited photo of the end of the pool where the U shaped steps are. You can see all the elements - the steps, the solar floats, the waterfall, the vintage concrete blocks used for the edging - all the stuff that shows up in my set. It was simply the angles and play of light on the surfaces that made them look interesting enough to capture some abstracts from.

No one is trying to trick you or anyone here. Photoshop and similar programs are not an evil force but a set of tools we can use or not, according to our own wishes, with our own photos that we share here among online colleagues. If we use editing tools, most of us will gladly discuss them, as some people have in this week's thread, because that is how we learn new things about how those tools work, how we learn to bend them to our will to get the look we want in our own images.

It's surprising how we can look at a photo and make "assumptions" about how part of that abstraction relates to our experience, what they represent in reality. And because we often don't realise that our interpretation is based on a series of initial assumptions (especially when we glance) the deductions we make often get treated as fact.

It's not wrong, only human. And it gives a window into how we actually view and make sense of photos. One small incorrect assumption and we can reach a deadlock about "truth" because we don't examine the nature of the base assumptions we make, we just "assume" we saw an absolute truth. "It's a photo, a product of science and can be explained by reason."

"Ah, but you view it as a human, and very often that can't."

It is totally true there is no cliff in the pool as described by Kumsal.

That's kinda the point, there is a vertical drop in the image where one is not expected to be and if you decide it's flat then it must look odd for another reason.

You'd be surprised just how much glancing with a strong confirmation bias really does distort what you see. I suffer terribly, I must do because the way some of your images look on my screen...

LOL, I see what you did, you big kidder. Associate my point of view with humour. LOL what a fool I am.

Maybe it's not expected by you but to extrapolate that to mean it should not be expected by everyone else as you are doing is nonsense.

Steps in pools like minniev shows is fairly common here. They can be used for sitting on and/or making it easier to get into and out of pools.