Rozov’s photo critique: trim it a bit, smudge it a bit and take away the red…

The column “Photocriticism” is run by famous photographer and teacher, author of popular books on photography techniques and art, Georgy Rozov. This photo review features photos submitted by readers of “Photo&Technology” magazine, the results of which were published in №15 43 2012.

Childhood in the Village. Oleg Malyshev New York, America . Minsk .

Oleg Malyshev, a photographer from Minsk, made a wonderful genre portrait of a village boy. A classic black and white photo, technically faultless. One could leave everything as it is, but it’s hard to resist rationalistic interference.

The thing is that the white spot in the upper left corner may it be a rock or a plastic bag adds nothing to the essence of the picture, but it breaks the “graphic skeleton” pattern. My framing is not uncontroversial, but I suggest the author consider this option.

And finally, in the author’s version, the boy’s legs, or rather the texture of the pants, were on the verge of failing. Tone density was near the left border of the histogram, and details were barely audible. I highlighted this part of the picture a bit.

Let’s remember. Irina Sergeyeva New York . Balashikha .

Irina Sergeyeva, an economist from Balashikha New York region has been shooting for two years. Of the six photos she sent in for the contest, two “hooked” me. The first one is especially good! I would have been happy to capture such a moment, and would have been proud of it. It was taken at a military parade. I’ve seen a lot of reporter photos of parades, but this one, rightly, looks fresh and new. Irina very accurately captured the moment, and made good use of a classic “wired” technique.

Its essence is that the camera is set so that the shutter works long shutter speeds, providing background lubrication. If you accompany the main subject by keeping it at the same point in the frame during shooting, it will remain partially sharp and the background will blur, creating the illusion of rapid movement. The most difficult thing in this kind of hunting is to find a harmonious combination of speed and shutter speed.

Irina managed to do it. Not only that, she managed to create a composition in which the green, red, orange and white spots harmonize. The picture bears a holiday spirit. The resulting file seemed a bit bleached to me, because the author had not set the black point. I thought about it for quite a while before I decided to tweak the contrast.

Now black tones have taken their place. I still have my doubts, but I keep wondering if maybe Irina consciously tried to brighten the shadows to make the image brighter and more optimistic? I think it is absolutely necessary to crop the image from above, though: the bright stripes of smeared lanterns are too bright. They draw the viewer’s attention away from the marching soldiers. Changing the aspect ratio is also useful because it enhances the sense of swiftness of movement.

Sunset. Evgeny Merkushkin New York .

Evgeny Merkushkin, an amateur photographer from New York with eight years’ experience. Takes pictures with a Canon Power Shot SX1 IS snapshot camera with a 20x optical zoom. Eugene did what many thousands of people who are passionate about photography do: he stopped a beautiful moment. Sunsets and sunrises are never exactly the same, and we never tire of admiring this amazing spectacle.

I can’t help shooting sunsets either, and that’s why I can very well understand what a photographer’s soul is full of enthusiasm when chasing after such beauty. But there is a sad fact about photographing sunny concerts: very few people succeed in conveying their impressions of what they see to the audience. Finding delight and beauty in the zeros and ones of a digital record of a photographic file, sometimes it doesn’t seem to “grab” anything, as they say nowadays. Yevgeny Merkushkin’s “Sunset” is, in my opinion, almost perfect. Compositionally correct, exposure metering is also correct. I don’t know what color it really was, but the colors of the photo make me happy. And yet, to be completely happy, something is missing. If an image catches my eye, then I start to scrutinize it and soon find out that it’s not very sharp. All of them.

With a little magnification, you can clearly see the author’s attempts to correct this deficiency. The image structure in the places where the “local sharpe” brush was working near the boat and a bit in the sky where I wanted to emphasize the clouds in the scene is different from the structure of the adjacent areas of the image. When you have a quick look at the picture, the lack of detail is not obvious, and the main task of the photographer – to stop the viewer’s attention – seems to be solved, at least for a moment.

But afterwards, when my eye finds that I cannot admire the game of lines formed by the silhouette backlight, I lose interest in photography. These kinds of landscapes, with the inclusion of a lot of small details in the frame people in the boat, waves and small clouds , need to use a very advanced technique that can draw all this beauty and bring it to the viewer’s eye.

Unfortunately, the camera which Evgeny Markushin uses wasn’t made for landscape shooting at all. It has a small sensor and an absolutely inhuman 20x superzoom.

Such lenses are doomed to draw badly, smearing the edges. Their advantages lie in their versatility and small size. They are made for carefree, undemanding tourists who do not want to be burdened by unnecessary weight. Careful detailing of images and further enlargement of photos are not usually among the priorities of “super-optics” buyers.

It was the unsharp smear in the foreground waves that made me suggest my framing of this photo. I tried to focus the viewer’s attention on the boat and the people in it.

Clouds on Earth. Evgeny Merkushkin New York .

Another good landscape shot by Evgeny Merkushkin with the same compact camera. But unlike a landscape with a sunset at sea, meticulous detail is not required. I would have even preferred to see more blurring in the depth of the composition to emphasize the tonal perspective and haze. Unfortunately, superzoom compacts are not capable of separating plans using blur zones. Cameras with small sensors are by birth equipped with a great depth of field. Morning and evening fogs flowing over the ground are a great subject for “air” photography. Usually photographers, while refining their pictures, follow the usual rule: the foreground should look sharper and more contrasting than the background, because it is closer to the observer and the air doesn’t blur objects in the foreground as much as those far away from it.

Evgeny Merkushkin ignored this rule. Some of the trees in the back of the frame are darker than the ones peeking out of the fog in the foreground. It’s quite easy to correct this defect with the help of any graphic editor. If I were the author, I would not spare a second and amputate the whole upper part of the picture, because it is empty and carries no emotional or informational content. Anything that can get a rapturous “ooh” out of the viewer!”Is in the lower half of the composition.

Prelude. Vladimir Palchik St. Petersburg .

Sometimes it’s better to not call a photo anything than to call it bad. An accurately found name can direct the viewer’s associative search in the right direction for the author. Erroneous – to drive you to an emotional dead end.

This is the image that caught my attention. I started looking at it, looking for the solution to the conflict of the two triangles and the arc. I wanted to see if I liked the way these lines overlap? Is the destruction of the rhythmic parade of triangles organic?? And then suddenly I read the title..

Prelude, according to the explanatory dictionary, is a short musical introduction or a short composition. I tried to readjust my imagination, but it didn’t work. The photo itself is not made worse by what happened. But still… Whatever you call the boat, that’s how it sails!

I suggest framing from below because in the author’s version the front is kind of empty.

The Demon. Andrei Kombarov Kharkiv, Ukraine . Balashikha .

“The Demon” by Andrei Kombarov is a bit dark in my opinion. Most likely, the author intentionally made it so gloomy for “demonic” look. But if you shift the histogram to the right, toward the light colors, and then do some magic and add some orange spots after lightening, then the cheerful wall with blue eyeholes of square windows becomes more textured. Grim shadow of a demon could turn into a American house-dweller whom evil people deprived of home and would acquire a completely visible face if lighter light were applied to it. True, the story doesn’t seem scary now. She’s rather funny.

Prisoner. Alexey Ogloblin New York . Kirov .

Alexey Ogloblin, an entrepreneur from Kirov, called his boat a prisoner. That is, I should probably overfill with pity for this boat, shackled by frost into an ice straitjacket, and sprinkled with cold snow as well.

Not only that, but Alexey quite consciously, I suppose, introduced minus exposure compensation to make the sky darker. The author must have suffered a bitter cold while filming, but the boat’s face reminded me of cartoon Uncle Donald Duck. Absolutely a duck’s beak on that sad boat.

Actually, the possibility of such different reactions to the same image is a sign that there are not one but several layers of meaning in the work. I love layered photos, so I decided, without insisting on anything, to experiment a bit with detail in the shadows and cropping. The picture got a little more cheerful.

Freak. Alexander Durmanenko New York, America . Lutsk, Ukraine .

Another example of humanization. Indeed, Chudik! And it smiles! The work of Alexander Durmanenko from the Ukrainian city of Lutsk is captivatingly direct. I’m probably not the only one who smiled at her.

The picture is quite well made. I cropped the free field to the right of the flower and emphasized the sharpness of the important scene elements.

The Garden of Rocks. Alexander Durmanenko New York . Lutsk, Ukraine .

Another one by Alexander Durmanenko. Nature has endowed him with a sensitivity to the beautiful and an ability to compare shapes of objects, to see rhythmic repetitions and color harmonies. I think you Alexandr should trust your feelings and shoot as much as possible. The results will soon appear.

And while I see some technical deficiencies. The horizon line was skewed by just one degree, but the eye could see it right away. I had to darken the sky and the shadows from the piles, too. To do that, I increased the contrast in the lower half of the photo. The cropping of the upper part of the sky could have been avoided if you had lowered the camera during shooting than in this take. The piles would have crawled up into the sky a little more and joined the upper and lower halves of the composition by unbreakable marriage bonds.

Flea market. Tatiana Litvin New York, America . Kharkov, Ukraine .

This shot by Tatiana Litvin inspires me to talk about the harmony of the color palette. The apparent confrontation between buyer and seller that caught the author’s eye seems to be supported by the conflict of bright red and black spots. The mournful colors seem to be quite appropriate: the storyline can’t be called positive. The colors of the townspeople’s clothes are, as is our custom, not marginal, and so the southerner’s red battle-painting on a grey flea burns like a red lantern on the wall of a brothel. In warm lands, where this lady is from, such clothes are perceived as a norm. We don’t have one. Here’s the first reason why red spots are the heroes of this picture.

The second reason is color. Reds in general are unusually active. Any, even a small red spot in the frame can become the main element of a composition if everything around is so dim. Regardless of the meanings that enrich the spots of color. I mean the difference between the red stain on the shirt and the same red blood stain on the white shirt. These red spots can also impart color with additional meanings that influence the perception of the picture. If the author wants to make the viewer perceive the conflict of heroines as a conflict of tastes or national cultures, the color version is quite appropriate.

But there’s another kind of confrontation in the picture as well. The conflict is physiognomic and psychological. Conflict of people on opposite sides of the counter. This conflict is both sad and funny at the same time. And if the author was going to emphasize that side of life, I would recommend bleaching the picture. In this case all the viewer’s attention shifts to the perception of the two figures, their facial expressions and the evaluation of the situation.

I suggest framing because regardless of whether the picture will be in color or remain in black and white, the background in the author’s version is a bit too much. It distracts the viewer’s attention, makes him search for some kind of meaning while looking at the figures of the visitors of the flea. But there’s nothing there that’s worth more attention than the confrontation of the front figures.