Photo critique by Rozov: experience helps us, but not everyone has had time to accumulate it…

The photos in the parsing include photos sent by readers to the Photo&Technique magazine photo contest, the results of which were published in No. 6 48 2014. The photos submitted for the contest announced by Nikon had to “put together a puzzle” giving an idea of the diversity of life that surrounds us all. The puzzle was a success, for my taste. It’s so colorful… It’s a real eye candy until you open each picture separately. And then when you zoom in, the motley previews of the puzzle squares are suddenly all alone, with no helpers, no makeup, they look like a soloist singing unaccompanied, a cappella. If you know how to sing, kudos and respect to you. You don’t hold notes – it’s painful to listen to everyone around you. I pulled some pretty previews from the puzzle, the ones that I found particularly appealing as babes. And that’s what they turned out a cappella, I’ll tell you now.

The column “Photocriticism” is run by Georgy Rozov, a well-known photographer and teacher, author of popular books on the technique and art of photography.

Dina Nurdinova’s reporter’s picture was made using a well-known technique. The camera is placed on a tripod, and the frame includes two objects in conflict with each other in shape: a moving and a stationary one. The first one smudges, the second one stays sharp, emphasizing the movement of the first one. Complicated technique, because it requires a successful combination of many components. I will start with fast lenses, better with a fixed focal point. These lenses are better at blurring the out-of-focus area, making it easier to detach the smeared mass of marching women from the background.

Any tripod won’t do – you need a stable one if it’s weak, you need to load it with something: the legs of any tripod stop shaking if you hang a couple of bricks on it, for example, or a heavy case with equipment . A stationary object has to stand still and not breathe, so as to remain sharp and not resemble a moving mass. The shutter speed should be chosen very precisely, to get exactly the degree of blurring of the moving object that is needed in this particular case.

And the shutter speed will change every time – depending on the speed of a person, train car, conveyor… And the shutter speed is adjusted by a wildcat method, i.e. by trial and error. Sometimes you have to compromise between wanting to blur and keeping sharpness. If the phenomenon is fleeting, as in this case, the photographer’s task is much more difficult. Experience is our guide, but not everyone has had time to accumulate it.

The variant with Rosov’s corrections

You need to remove all unnecessary sharp or bright spots from the frame, which can distract attention from the main objects in the frame. If you can’t do it when you’re shooting, you’ll have to learn how to do it on the computer. I didn’t want the viewer to see any signs of tampering.

Unfortunately, Dina did not meet all the conditions listed above. The sailor in the foreground is a bit smeared. And I’m not sure he moved. There’s a good chance that the tripod was moving. Dina’s lens has all the qualities of an inexpensive kit zoom: it has an indistinct bokeh pattern and a very large depth of field, which always leaves the background indecently sharp and therefore aggressive. In the foreground, the almost white sidewalk is shining in a whitewash, distracting attention from the funny paling of the right legs of the women’s battalion. And above the current pylons break the rhythmic pattern of the columns, the outline of the chapel, the windows, the vertical wall of the building, the traffic light… I had nothing to do but to remove the excess in an attempt to somehow fix the imperfections of the photography, to confirm the idea that the basis of this work is quite decent. After treatment, it does not look bad at all. Let’s consider the sketch for the motion capture a success.

A very cute scene of a child and a cat. Photographically accurate, with a very precise moment of capturing the movements of the characters. The puddle with the reflection of the gutter’s yawn and the cat’s tail pipe is very nice. The dark porch door balances out the right and left side of the shot. Congratulations to the author on his success!

Ksenia Nyandoma.

The author didn’t have a title and didn’t say exactly where he shot this landscape, but I can assume that we’re looking at the north of America. The forest is wet, the ground is waterlogged, so the trees are sickly. To say that I like such places, I can not in any way. But I’m willing to believe that this landscape warms someone’s soul, that it is with such meager beauty that nostalgic memories can be associated. However, the landscape itself and the landscape in the picture plane are two quite different things. The peculiarities of perception of photography are rather well studied, and our predecessors have long since learnt the rules that help not to make mistakes, which are punished by the highest measure of rejection, when the viewer just flips through the picture.

It leaves nothing in his memory. It’s a shame for the creator, isn’t it?? In this case the author composed his shot without taking into account that the light triangle in the sky is so bright that the viewer’s eye is fixated on it, because that empty white triangle filled with nothing occupies almost half of the photo height. I can only guess that the photographer wanted to draw my attention to the beauty of the foreground grass. But in that case the frame should have been constructed quite differently already at the time of shooting. Like squatting down and tilting the camera forward to exclude the sky from the frame, or capture it just a little bit. To visualize my suggestion, I framed this shot. It became almost square, but that didn’t make it worse, rather the opposite.

Vitaly from Maloyaroslavets sent not just one, but several submissions. And all of them are made quite well, from a photographic point of view, almost flawlessly. There’s just one thing I can’t understand: “What did the poet want to say with the bird of God??”. If you analyze the rest of Vitaly’s photos, you can assume that the author hopes to attract the viewer’s attention with the help of light, almost innocent affectation, inventing various funny, from his point of view, everyday situations, which are then played by nonprofessional actors.

I must admit that I never once believed the author and did not even smile once. I felt pity for the girl in the picture. I pictured myself sitting naked on the cold surface of a dirty bathtub that had been brought to the barnyard especially for this shoot. Believe that this dish is always there, that the cattle are fed from it, and then the photographer’s muse is washed in it?.. No, as Stanislavsky said, I do not believe it. One can, of course, assume that this is a picture of nudes. That is, we are invited to admire the beauty of the naked female body. The theme is evergreen, but it is, in my opinion, underexposed. Geese look more convincing and beautiful.

Yekaterina Moskaluk made a very graphic winter landscape. Almost flawless. Almost, because he looks sluggish. In such cases, photographers say: “The white and black points are not set. In other words, the picture has no completely black tones and no whites in particular. That’s what makes it look gray, it doesn’t ring a bell. This is what the landscape should look like on a cloudy, gray day. But the shadows from the snow fences are a convincing indication that the sun is open. Not a single cloud covers it. That’s why I’ve lightly edited this beautiful work so that it appears to the reader in the fullness of its tonal range.

Variant with Georgy Rozov’s editing

Great landscape with wonderful diagonal folds in the terrain and shadow patterns. The modest and irresistible charm of the monochrome yellow-green shades. The photo already looks good without my interference. But I can’t help saying that there’s another recipe not used by the author to make the landscape a little brighter, more festive, juicier.

Almost backlit, which is characterized by high contrasts between the light and shade of the image, lead me to the idea that in this case we should slightly increase the brightness in the light and add shadows. The curves of any graphic editor can do it in half a minute. And there are wonderful transformations of colored spots. Darkening makes the color richer, shading makes it discolored, and excessive lightening makes it whiter. You can compare two versions: before my intervention and after. And choose the one you like. They both have a right to exist.

Version with corrections by Georgy Rozov

Using gradient filters, especially colored filters, or “Photoshop” gradients to change the brightness and color ratio in part of the composition of a photograph can greatly help the photographer overcome the resistance of the material. Can make a better photo, but with a lack of knowledge, observation, and taste can kill the shot. Here in this case the author used the technique of painting the sky in sunset colors. In principle, the technique could well work, if the light coloring is not only in the upper half of the photo, but also in the lower half.

Note the water and the reflections on the rocks’ humps: they reflect the light of the setting sky. And if the sky was colored in yellow-orange tones, the water and the backs of rocks would also have to be colored in the same way! It’s the law of physics from high school: The angle of incidence of light equals the angle of reflection. I diligently studied physics at school, so the ineptitude of the photographer in this case is no mystery to me. It’s a beautiful picture graphically. And if it is properly retouched, it could become a poster and decorate the wall of the room.

That p-turn.Okie, the life-changing hud. v.Polenova

Deep twilight

Mamiya 645E, 80/2.8, shutter speed 10 min., Velvia 50

Vadim shoots on a slide. “Velvia 50 is good film. But even with it, you shouldn’t make such extreme experiments. Ten minutes of exposure time for a landscape shot is a lot. Even in calm weather there may be a slight breeze. The trees, grass in the foreground, water in the river, clouds: everything around moves, so the motion is inevitable. Shooting at dusk is another challenge. The thing is that the human eye perceives a twilight landscape quite differently than the film or image sensor of a camera.

The eye is perfectly capable of seeing millions of colors in bright light, but at twilight, all the cats are gray to us. And film at slow shutter speeds continues to reproduce colors according to their physical color temperature. The day was cloudy, and at dusk the diffused light was not colored by the blue sky. What we see here is not dusk at all, but a gray day. The author had to scan and digitize the picture.

In doing so, he most likely tried to ennoble it, but failed to take into account the fact that the foreground shouldn’t have been brightened up so much and the sky should have been compressed. The usual order of things for an observer was broken: dark earth below, and bright sky above! You want to turn the picture upside down to restore the balance. In a word, in my opinion, I shouldn’t have saved this failed slide. It might be better to go back and try again in a better light.

Alexander Zizenkov’s octopus is based on the same technique as in photo 6. So the graphic image should remind the viewer of a familiar octopus or an octopus… The joy of recognition is the basis of positive reaction to such pictures: the author made a charade, and I solved it! The trick usually works.

It’ll work this time, too. But many people sensitive to the perception of geometric forms, probably, will grin unhappily and go to look at other pictures with regret. The point is that straight lines of wires completely kill the intricate twists and turns of the tentacles of the imaginary octopus. The author probably sensed the weakness of the image and decided to back it up by throwing the viewer a cheat sheet, so that no one could miss a hint of the scary sea monster in the car tracks crossed by the wires.

What to do with the wires, of which there are a lot in our cities? I know only two solutions to this problem, and they depend not on the mayor’s office but on the photographer himself. You can look for subjects or shooting points that eliminate wires in the frame of the camera’s frame window. Or, on the contrary, one could look for some kind of artistic or geometrical order in the tangle of wires and base his photographic compositions on it.