Photo critique by Rozov: let go of multicolored balls

Several previous collections of photos intended for flight parsing contained very competent works submitted to our contests. It seemed to me that primary photographic education has penetrated deeply into the masses of readers, and it was only left to point out the great successes and small missed opportunities in the reviews. The files I received this time, however, were not as sumptuous. We’ll have to go back to simple things: framing and highlighting the main thing in the frame.

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.

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1. i 2.”Selling Dreams.”

Alexander

Durmanenko. Lutsk, Ukraine.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS37.

Aperture f/4.7

Exposure 1/500 sec

ISO 100

Conversion to B/W

A stamp is a photographer’s name for a bright technique, which has been used often and for a long time, and therefore is boring to everyone in the world. That’s what happens when you get the same delicious cake from morning till night. Very soon you want something sharp, salty, sour, but not sweet.

Alexander’s work is not just a stamp but a very common stamp. This technique of partial bleaching or partial coloring is usually used in advertising photography to draw attention to an important part of the composition, such as a magazine cover. In a portrait, for example, they would bleach everything, leaving only the lips bright red. Television commercials still contain partial de-inking, which is accepted by the audience rather calmly, without any protests: the world of advertising is conventional, any kind of fiction is possible in it. But Alexander Durmanenko’s genre picture is not at all an advertisement for balloons. It’s about a girl’s dreams. Already for this reason, the emphasis of color on the balls is not justified.

Doubting the appropriateness of applying an advertising stamp to a genre picture, I decided to return it to its “primordial state. And then I trimmed it, removing everything that seemed unnecessary.

My old folks taught me in my youth: if you can cut something out of a photograph without damaging the perception, it means it’s not well thought out. However, after some simple manipulation, the picture became quite a decent genre study.

3. “And winter came.”

Evgeny Turkov. Penza.

Nikon D90 camera

Nikkor 18-105mm f/3 lens.5-5.6G AF-S ED DX VR

Aperture f/9

Shutter speed 1/125 sec

ISO 200

Elegiac photo by Evgeny Turkov pleased me with its technical and compositional precision. The clean and damp freshness of late American autumn reeked. In my opinion, you should have just slightly increased the contrast with the help of curves in “Photoshop”, because trying not to lose the texture of the snow, Evgeny did not set the black point and white point. The picture ended up looking gray. I too did not want to risk losing detail in the highlights, and deliberately muted the tones in the second and third zones of the Adams scale. The picture became bright and resonant.

(For those to whom the Adams scale reference seems too complicated a matter, I will say that it is only ten squares painted in gray, colorless dye. From perfect white to gray to pitch black. You can read, for example, in my first book “How to shoot. The Art of Photography” .

4. “And silently the fog was floating.”

Evgeny Turkov. Penza.

Nikon D90

Nikkor 18-105mm f/3 lens.5-5.6G AF-S ED DX VR

Aperture f/9

Exposure 1/125 seconds

ISO sensitivity 200

Another landscape by Yevgeny Turkov. Before writing about it, I showed it to a few girls who look at a lot of different pictures, but do not shoot themselves. They liked the picture almost unconditionally. Airy, delicate, touching. Such is the voice of the people.

But I, due to my direct involvement in the process, was immediately struck by the “photographer’s ears”. I’ve shot fog more than once, in the morning and evening, on plains and in the mountains. I know very well what fog looks like in photos, so some of the incongruities hurt my eye. Evgeny probably took photos of the lake in the morning and saw the fog with his eyes, but he wasn’t satisfied with the resulting file.

“We can use Photoshop if we know how to use it correctly, but in this case, Evgeny’s degree of skill with this wonderful program does not yet allow him to draw the “right” fog. The imperfections are too noticeable and interfere with beliefs and feelings. Let me make it clear: the area of the boat is not aligned and remains a bright rectangular spot the sharpness of the boat contours, rods, and the fisherman’s face are not much different from the image parameters in the center of the frame. In the fog, the tonal perspective, that is, the light scattering had to eat up the sharpness, the detail, and the contrast of the fence and the vegetation behind it, not to mention the house on the left.

In short, the fog does not look real. From my point of view. But this is likely to remain a mystery for most viewers. Though, this kind of consolation would only have encouraged me, and I would have started reading books about “Photoshop”.

5. “The Crow River”

Sergey Gritsko. Tambov region.

Sony A550 camera

Sergey sent for the contest a typical Central American landscape. A meadow with a river, green grass and even a boat. I like the place the author has chosen for shooting, so it’s a pity that Sergei hasn’t managed to squeeze all he’s got into his subject. There are a few reasons for that.

Not a very good choice of shooting location. The boat in the foreground on the right is the only man-made object, and therefore it already draws attention to itself, but from this point on the boat is not pleasing to the eye. Not only is it cropped in an illogical way, but it is almost vertical in the frame, arguing with the diagonal line of the river. It would be understandable, if it was parallel to the river bank. In any case the presence of such a prominent object in the frame would have to be justified in some way. In light accent, sharpness, contrast or whatever, but the boat should be admired and become the main thing in the picture. But it happens almost automatically with everything that’s in the foreground of a landscape shot. And if you can not make a boat look beautiful, it makes sense to leave it and take a picture of what nature has done. She is never wrong, her taste is impeccable.

That’s why the light green grass to the left of the boat becomes the main focus in this case, but it’s not as good as I’d like either. If you look closely at the color of the leaves in the foreground, you will be surprised to find that they seem to be painted in the same color from a spray-gun, and you can’t find any halftones. You can get this kind of depressing monotony by artificially boosting saturation when converting a RAW file. As a result, volumes and texture of objects disappear, the picture becomes flat and unexpressive. Note: only the grass in the foreground, to the left of the boat, is saturated. And to the right you can see what the vegetation looked like before processing. The green objects here are three-dimensional and multicolored. Sea of colors. And further on, in the back of the frame, the vegetation delights the eye with its realistic variety of colors.

Something similar happened to the sky when the author bleached and darkened it. I understand if you wanted pre-threatening drama, or if you didn’t like the combination of blue sky and yellow-green grass. These shades often don’t live next to each other. The author has succeeded in his aim: the color dissonances have disappeared, but the compositional ones remain.

The thing is that the horizon line which divides the picture exactly in half, puts the viewer before the choice of deciding which is more important: the ground or the sky. Positioning the horizon line on one of the lines of the rule of thirds is caused by the desire to solve this question for the viewer, to save him from a painful analysis of the picture on the compositional level. It is up to him, the viewer, to say “Wow!!”.

But I quite often see wonderful landscapes with a symmetrical division of the picture on top and bottom, and they are quite harmonious, beautiful landscapes. The rule of thirds in these seems to have been broken, and no punishment was given..

Looking through this kind of happy departures from the accepted compositional standards one finds quite a logical explanation for the successes. Somewhere the full symmetry of the sky and its reflection in the river, puddle, polished stone, metal surface of the tabletop… Or a blade of grass, a lamppost, or a beautiful tree which merge the disintegrated parts of the composition.

In Sergei’s work, the sky is empty, but the ground has a lot to look at. That’s why I would suggest opting for the bottom part of the frame. The result is almost a square with nothing extra.

6. “Hearts”

Kateryna Moskaluk. Lvov, Ukraine.

Canon EOS 50D camera

Canon EF 28-135mm f/3 lens.5-5.6 IS USM

Aperture f/6.3

Exposure 1/160 sec

ISO Sensitivity 100

Nice genre shot! Catherine managed to combine difficult to combine things: she caught the moment of a lively display of love, emotional emancipation, charming tenderness of the two lovers and at the same time very accurately combined the two halves of the photograph. The left thirds rule of thirds show the main thing “dark on light”, and the second couple on the right “light on dark. The main thing is in the foreground, the sharpness is concentrated on the main characters, the decisive moment is caught, and so the picture is instantly readable. Viewers don’t pass by pictures like this!

7. “Easter” by Tatiana Litvin. Kharkov, Ukraine.

Olympus E-M5 camera

8. Easter cropped version .After tight cropping the main thing in the frame has moved to the third zone. At this point, it would seem, one could settle down and enjoy what has been achieved. However, I tried to darken the background behind the main character, so that the water drops forming the arc of the halo would be even more contrasting against the dark background.

The genre scene captured by Tatiana is a good reason to talk again about the role of framing. I understand how difficult it is to correctly frame such a dynamic procedure. The priest is usually unpredictable: predicting the trajectory of a stream of holy water is not an easy task. And it’s easier to focus on the central point than on the peripheral sensors. That’s why the luminous halo of water droplets was in the center of the frame. The author felt that the visual and semantic accent was there, that this arc was the main thing in the frame. But the author didn’t have time to think what to do with the emptiness at the top of the composition. In such cases, of course, it is better to shoot somehow than not to shoot at all.

At home, in the process of converting, you can think about the compositional arrangement of the frame and put it in order. The main rule of framing is to remove everything unnecessary. Everything that prevents a quick reading of the picture. Here, for example, the wall above the women’s heads certainly doesn’t add anything. It could be amputated by cropping horizontally. But then the father would also lose his head? Alas! And the priest’s head isn’t too important. It can be sacrificed. Moreover, the light stripe that has formed behind the back of the butt is annoying and distracts from the halo of splashes. It too should be sacrificed. What about the main character’s girlfriend?? Do I have to amputate too?? In my opinion, it’s a pity, she’s squinting very nicely. But if you’re a consistent minimalist, you should cut!

In the end we got a nice genre portrait of a girl with a kulich. It is worth weeping and noting that the camera matrix price efficiency in this case is 30%. That is, the opportunity to get the most detailed photo is not used in the most rational way. Cropping it up tightly during shooting would have noticeably improved the details. photo 8 .

9. “A non-boring garden.”

Alexander Tutaev. Dolgoprudny, New York region.

Canon 5D Mark III

Manual mode

Sigma 85 mm/1.4

F/2 aperture

Shutter speed 1/250 s

ISO sensitivity 3200

Converted to B/W

The emotional impact of a photograph is not directly related to the significance of the event or phenomenon depicted in it. Alexander Tutaev’s work, in my opinion, is from the category of almost abstract. Try to describe what is depicted on it in words. I ended up listing ordinary things: evening, a bench, a street lamp, tree trunks, a slope, autumn leaves on it, a strip of road in the foreground… It seems to be nothing special, but the picture makes you look at itself, draws you into a mysterious world with the eyes of a forester, translucent twilight. It sets up the inner world in a special way. That’s why they say about some pictures that they are “in tune”. And in this case I don’t want to analyze if the author used composition techniques correctly or not. Its aim has been achieved.