Critique #8 Theme *Portrait* (5 person, 1 image each)

raid amin said:
Oooops! It has to be a portrait! I will repost.


This now is a portrait of a Petra bedouin taken immediately after the first Gulf War.
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I really like this one! The way the light is used here, the background, and the subject's posture and placement on the frame is well done here. If there's anything that I could complain about here is that some of the left shoulder's off the frame and (I'm really nitpicking here) a chair leg is sneaking in from the center of the left edge of the frame.

Portraits are usually thought of to be more "tight", meaning, the face is on more of the frame area, but as a character portrait, this gives us him wearing a uniform, holding a cigarette, it places him geographically (i.e. not somebody you'd find in Belize) and what's more, there is a genuine interaction between subject and photographer, which can only be interpreted by the rest of us, the viewers.

And my venture into asking if this is a 50mm Summicron (version I), wide open?
 
raid amin said:
Oooops! It has to be a portrait! I will repost.


This now is a portrait of a Petra bedouin taken immediately after the first Gulf War.

Raid
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A good one, I too like the whole person more for such a photo than a tight crop. Somehow it seems that the better you know a person the closer you can go. Only he tight crop at the rhs is a bit disturbing.

Fitzi
 
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gabrielma said:
I really like the catchlights, and the angle of the head, as well as the choice of angle and height. It's unfortunate that the background makes your choice of square crop immediately look like it is disproportionate, which is evidently an illusion; I would have chosen a "portrait" crop (as opposed to "landscape") rather than the square one given the background.

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Gabriel,
the suqare format results from a crop which was made because the background was structured too disorderly and so I took the frame of the window to get a closed composition. The postprocessing was tuned for a classic soft and low-contrast look, and that is in my eyes the weak point, the photo is at least at the lower limit concerning contrast, if not below..
To add more contrast with PS does not help, the (C41) neg IS a bit flat and one cannot really improve it with th big PS hammer.
Somewhat like a "saved " snapshot, now looking pretty digital !:)

Fitzi
 
The rules state that we should not comment on our own photos until everybody has commented on that photo. Just a friendly reminder.

Raid
 
wlewisiii said:
Adds up to five to me.

During a walk home from the park.

William
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William,
I suggest to crop the top (the green part) and leave the rest as is. The pole sticking out there is not helping the image, and the geometrical patterns on the ground are more pronounced without the distracting green showing.

Raid
 
gabrielma said:
OK, Todd gave me a wet willy, and I had to say "yes" to make him stop.

So here's my entry...

EDIT: (forgot to put my own comments) --- This is a hand-held, nonstudio, rangefinder shot. It's at the lens' minimum focusing distance (~ 0.7m). Used a Leica M6 and 50mm Summilux-M (pre-asph) lens. Available light. No post-processing, no posing. I wanted to get the subject "as-is" (she's leaning on the counter).

Scanned from the negative.
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I like this image. There is direct eye contact. There is colorful bokeh. There is body language. There is no room left for useful cropping, so all I can add would be along the lines of "what could you have done differently ...".
The chopped off arms are not perfect.

Nice work.


Raid
 
fitzihardwurshd said:
This is mine , a scanned print, IMHO some weak points but one good point, curious to learn how others will judge it ! :)
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Fitzi,

Overall, this is a nice portrait.
The harsh (light) background makes the image appear to have low contrast. The woman may look even better if you had taken the photo from a higher angle and from the left of the image shown.


Raid
 
I view a "portrait" as being a wider field than just the traditional photo of a face or body. The drummer was more an environmental portrait in the world of jazz.

Please don't dwell on it and the discussions surrounding it. Let's move on.

Raid
 
Oy, are we getting into "offensive" again?

This always happens when you have nonnative English speakers trying to speak nuances and others using words in another language that could be meaning something else when nothing of the sort was intended. I'm a nonnative English speaker, so je le sais.

Can we go back to the critique (of the photos), Freunden?
 
gabrielma said:
Oy, are we getting into "offensive" again?

This always happens when you have nonnative English speakers trying to speak nuances and others using words in another language that could be meaning something else when nothing of the sort was intended. I'm a nonnative English speaker, so je le sais.

Can we go back to the critique (of the photos), Freunden?
Click to expand...

I started the German note, so accept my appologies.
Let's get back to "work".

Raid
 
Now that I can sit down for more than 5 minutes, I've had a chance to look at a wonderfully diverse set of shots. At least I missed the excitement ;)

Gabrielma - Nice expression and I really like the use of the colorful bokeh from the bottles and lights in the background. The only thing I'd maybe look at is some different crops, depending on what you have on the negative. This one just feels a bit tight for me.

Raid - I liked the bird, that could have been fun to keep in. Missed the drummer apparently. This one is exqisite though. Very environmental and shows a man whos lived a more difficult than many of us. I also like the use the lighting on the surroundings and the highlighting given by what color there is there. If I can think of something that you could improve, I'll let you know... :angel:

Fitzihardwurshd - Interesing to wonder what she's seeing out of frame. I like the lines created by the tilt of her head and neck. About the only suggestion I can think of is to maybe try to get a little bit more light on the shadowed side of her face - it's left just a little dark for my tastes.

Mango - Good humorus shot - those are so hard to do without there being something mean somewhere in the image. This is just a quick moment with a friend kind of image. What is the brightness/blur across the top? If that's not an element of how you see the image, I'd suggest cropping to just below it.


Thank you to all of you for once again giving some pleasant moments observing and then trying to quantify it somehow. It's very helpful to my own shooting.

William
 
We still need to give a second opinionon each image; I am finding this sometimes difficult since my first impression is often my last impression.

Raid
 
I don't have any further comments right now, but I did think that I thought I'd share that I showed my wife the image I posted to this thread. Her comment was to get an 8x10 on the wall... well, SHMBO always wins, but it is nice when it strokes the ego as well. I didn't alter the crop for that print though I will probably play with it for the experience for future situations - IIRC I was concentrating on how that lower left corner looked and let that bit slip into the frame.

I am grateful for the comments I received about it; I always find them very helpful.

William
 
My photo was taken shortly after the first gulf war ended and Iraq was in a disaster [now it is worse of course]. I traveled to Jordan from the USA like thousands of Iraqis living away from Iraq to meet with our families in Amman since Iraqis could not get any visas except to Jordan. I rented an apartment in Amman for my parents and sister and her kids, and during one of those sad weeks, I took off for two days to visit Petra. I was the only person visiting that place in 48 hours! These day, the same place is full with hundreds of toursists.
The Badool bedoiuns welcomed me like one of them, and they offered me hospitality. I was given tea, and we chatted under the tent of the war and other oldtime wars. This old bedouin was talking about WWII, and we were four men sitting under the tent. I casually took some photos in a candid manner. I am glad you like the result.


Raid
 
Thank you all for your input and comments.

So some more info on my photo: it is full-frame, no cropping was done. I got as close as I could, from the other side of the counter where she was. She's leaning on that counter, where there's a lot of clutter, btw, so I chose to place her eyes in the middle while placing the arms as much as I could on places that would "make sense" (the corner and the middle), well, to me at that moment, anyway.

I like to take pictures of things and people as they are, and I didn't want to instruct her on how to stand; I wanted to get her natural poise.

I used a Leica M6 with my 50mm f/1.4 Summilux pre-asph, on Fuji Superia 400.

Edit: "counter" is at a coffee-shop. Those colored things in the background are coffee travel mugs.
 
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