mountainscape

[piranha]

the mainland from the ferry to horseshoe bay, vancouver. a sad failure as a photograph because it is out of focus and way underexposed (therefore had lots of chroma noise) -- it was already too dark to take pictures without a tripod. but i like the layer effect of the mountain ranges, and after removing the worst of the noise, it has a painterly quality.

Comments

Re: mountainscape

[flarenut.livejournal.com]

It depends on whether you define photograph as "accurate rendition of the visible pixels of of the scene in front of the lens" or "good rendition of what the photographer _saw_."

Many of the iconic great photographs are a) technically speaking lousy photographs, b) were manipulated all to heck to get them to the state we know, or c) both of the above.

I like that one a lot, precisely because it gets the layering and ignores the rest.

Re: mountainscape

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

neither of those really hit it for me as to what i regard as a "good photograph", though the latter weighs more.

but to qualify, it ought to fulfill technical requirements of relevant sharpness, the desired hues, proper saturation, and good composition. without that, it won't make the cut for me. that's not enough, however. the other qualities it's got to have are a lot more difficult to define -- a point of view that compels me to look at the image again, some emotional impact, possibly telling a story even if a short one.

this image has some of the latter, but almost none of the former. if it had more of the latter, if it had amazingly much of the latter, then the former wouldn't matter quite as much. like, the famous picture of the naked girl running in vietnam; i saw a newspaper copy of that, so the quality reeked, but really, who cares about the quality. that image had so much emotional impact it could have been technically shite, and i would have remembered it forever anyway.

but that's rare, that something packs that sort of punch, and i don't require it to consider a photograph to be good. many of the photos i admire are technically speaking excellent, in addition to having some emotional content as well. compared to those, this image just doesn't measure up. and it isn't really a good rendition of what i saw, it only gets the layering; it doesn't capture the light, the chroma noises futz up the hues, the snow-capped mountains in the very back aren't visible enough, and the scene was overall much sharper and clearer to my eyes. that was the photo i tried to take, and it didn't work. this isn't false modesty talking, nor do i think i am too critical of myself; i think this is a fairly accurate assessment.