DigaPixBlog

Leading lines are an important element in guiding the viewer through a composition.  Sometimes they are subtle and other times they hit you over the head and say this is how I want you to see this subject.  They are also useful to tie elements of a layout together.

With the bold white line cutting across the tarmac to the feet of the walker I don’t think you could call this leading line subtle.  It is bold and in your face.  Without it there would be no composition.  I like the early morning light and the way the photo-artist had limited our field of view so we have to use our imagination about the pedestrian in the shot. 

Notice that the horizon, in this case the sidewalk edge, is nice and striate.  This line is located at the feet of the subject thou we can see they have not reached the curb.  With the horizon one fourth of the way down from the top of the frame the viewer has a feeling of being insignificant, almost a hidden voyeur.

My only complaint is that I wish the person in the composition were more interesting.  This would give our imagination more to work with when creating a story about the subject.

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Street scene photography sounds simple.  All you have to do is take you camera out in public and photograph people.  There is a lot more to it than that.  The trick is to find people in situations that interest the viewer and draw them into a story, a story that we can relate to without any explanation except the photograph itself.

This image taken at the Ventura pier tells the story of two young girls shearing a summer day.  They are on their own in the company of each other.  The photographer has placed the subjects near the bottom of the frame with plenty of room for them to move into the scene.  The other people on the pier are of such a size and distance that they do not distract from the story of the two friends.

I would like to make two minor suggestions.  The print appears to be just a little over saturated.  I would suggest coming down about ten percent.  Another thing to consider would be cropping out just a little off the right hand side of the composition to place the subjects squarely on the center line.

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There are all sorts of interesting and colorful caricatures out there.  And there are some just plain weird ones.  When we have the opportunity to capture most of them it is in environments that may not be conducive to a good or interesting photograph.  But we can’t pass up the chance to get what we can.

This is truly an interesting character.  Yes this is a human and not a statue from someone’s wrapped imagination.  The photographer has used computer filters to exaggerate the weirdness of the subject and in so doing creating a creature we would only expect to see in an extremely distorted nightmare.

I like the three dimensional effects this illustration creates which increases the imaginary threat this haunting image presents.  It would have been nice if we could have eliminated the street scene background, the white in the lower left hand corner is distracting.

Please, don’t hang this photograph on the wall of any room in my house!  I want to sleep at night.

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When we got our first copy of Photoshop the first thing we did was play around with the cool filters.  Some of them made little or no perceptible change and others were so crazy we could not imagine what in the world we would ever use them for.  The next stage was to take the filters we liked and apply them to bad photographs until we got something unusual that we thought others would like, but generally they were just bad photographs with a filter applied.

This photo-artist is a master of the filters tools.  This is not just some image where someone played around with the filters pallet; this is an image where the knowledgeable artist applied filters to get a desired result.

This manipulated image has all the detail and felling of a water color wash pen and ink drawing by a master.  This is an illustration that draws us into the details and makes us want to look closer and closer.  The subject is the crowd and the crowd is in a flowing motion that draws us into the center of this throng of humanity.  You cannot appreciate this image unless you can blow it up to the largest size possible and study the detail.

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I have not spent much time in New York City but one time when I drove with a local the trip appeared to go by just like this photograph, a blur.  Let me tell you my driver was nuts.

We definitely get the feeling of movement and power in this blurred motion photograph.  The yellow cab against the gray and red background stands out like a beacon.  It appears that this photograph was taken from another moving vehicle.

This type of photography is exciting but you never know what you are going to get until the image is processed.  There is one anomaly in the image I can’t explain.  If you look at the yellow highlight on the door side of the taxi it is mostly straight and horizontal but the white motion blur of the window and the top of the cab have a definite wave to them.

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This image tells me that the father taking the picture knows something about photography.  The first thing I notice is that he is down at eye level with the subject.  Most snap shooters would take their picture standing up looking down on the child.  He has placed the child in an unusual but graphic rich environment.  And the photograph is being taken while the subject in not looking into the camera. 

The composition of this image uses the patterns of the repeating horizontal lines of the tracks as the unifying theme.  This along with the camera pointing at the child unifies the two subjects into an unbreakable bond.  I see the photo-artist has used a computer filter to alter the image.  The assumption I make is that this was done to add more interest.  In this case the filter may not have been necessary, but not bad either.

Perhaps the photo-artist would consider a couple alterations to this image.  The shadows of the trees at the top of the frame add a micro amount of distracting information to this very pure image.  In the foreground there is a white crack in the asphalt entering the frame.  These both could be removed by cropping or cloning on the computer. As always the photographer is the one that must decide what he wants in the final composition.

By the way, from the information in this photo I think it was taken in the Los Angeles Griffith Park Travel Town section.

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Street photography is one of the most difficult categories to critique because a principle requirement is that it tells a story.  And the story told is subjective to the viewer.  The juxtaposition of the woman with her umbrella and the red umbrella on the ground might have some metaphorical meaning or it may just be an umbrella on the ground.   

There are a couple graphic elements that the photographer may wish to consider.  First the woman’s white umbrella has a tendency to look like a white hole against the darker colors of the rest of the image.  Her umbrella could be tinted to a different hue to make it more harmonious with the rest of the scene.  

The red umbrella may be more interesting than the woman.  It has a luminosity that attracts our attention and holds the eye.  I feel we have two photographs here in one frame, as the title of this piece says “Boston Woman Seeking Cans” & “Red Umbrella”.

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