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| "Dead Tree," Taken in Greenbelt, MD, August 2010 |
My print of the photograph above, "Dead Tree," is what well and truly convinced me otherwise. I was quite happy with the composition and mood of the photograph when I worked it up, with the creepy vibe from the tree stump and its dead branch reaching up like a claw. I always thought, though, that the truly vast number of individual leaves in the shot made the background look busy. When I got my 10.5" x 14" print from my printer, I was shocked at the result: The background was beautiful, adding to the picture rather than detracting from it. I suspect that the impression of busy-ness conveyed by the computer image was, in part, the result of a lot of adjacent pixels with a large difference in tone; the resulting sharp, square edges made the background look displeasing. In the print, though, more detail was resolved and the transitions between tones were less harsh, producing a smoothly detailed sea of leaves.
Although I have not yet had it printed (buying a new house and moving wreaks havoc on time, organization, and budgets), I suspect the photograph below, "Bridge Over Frozen Water," will show a similar improvement upon printing, with the busy clouds becoming smooth and appealing.
So, I'm convinced: If you want to really appreciate a picture, especially those with lots and lots of high-contrast detail, you need to see the print.
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| "Bridge Over Frozen Water," Taken in Rosslyn, VA, January 2011. |
These two are among my favorites of yours so far. In particular, I enjoy the creepiness of the titular tree and the contrast between the natural and artificial int eh Bridge shot.
ReplyDeleteRandom, unrelated question: What's your opinion of the tilt-shift photography that seems to be all the rage these days?
Thank you for the kind words.
ReplyDeleteAs for tilt-shift, I find it a bit of an odd phoenomenon. Real tilt-shift lenses were designed to mimic the motions of view cameras, and the point of them is to get everything into focus and to correct for perspective distortions. The current fad is to use (or digitally mimic) an intentional mis-tilt (or swing, depending on the orientation) to render much of the frame out-of-focus. This mimics the look of macro photography, where the depth of field is very low, thus leading to the impression that minatures are being photographed.
Personally, I find the whole thing to be badly overdone. The first few you see have a "Whoa, neat!" sort of quality, but by the eleventy-leventh, it's lost its punch. I don't recall ever seeing a photograph where the intentional mis-tilt is obvious that I thought was artistically successful. In this regard, it joins other faddish photographic techniques (like HDR and "film grain" post-processing) in being less appealing the more obvious it is.