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cutler:
For those of you who didn't see my early submissions: I have access to my grandfather's rather large collection of photo negatives. Many are portraits of his co-workers. Many of the images are boring but there are some which jump out at me. . . like this one. What do you think of it? The thing I'm most interested in, feedback-wise, is whether you think it is worth looking at--is it _interesting_? More technical comments are, of course, also welcome. |
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sprice:
I suppose this is a technical comment, but it's interesting that when I look at this on a monitor (which probably has bad color settings), there's very little contrast between the hair and the wood behind the man; on a laptop screen, it looks great. |
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gabriel:
Regarding contrast:almost definitely a monitor color correction thing. Not sure if PNG has a good way to encode appropriate balances (things like Photoshop's internal format do), but my monitor (or, really, my XFree86 server) certainly wouldn't know what to do with it if it did. That aside, the hair stands out fine from the wood for me, but the face is mighty washed out... which is an effect I actually kind of like for this image.
Chris, I do think this is an interesting image to look at. The man's expression is ambiguous... surprise? just-before-anger? He seems to be concentrating mighty hard at something over my left shoulder, hard enough that I want to turn around and see what it is. |
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tasha:
Why yes, he _is_ interesting, Monsieur Cutler. His honest semi-cluelessness is very attractive. As is the hair ; ]. I'm intrigued with the 'characters taken out of context' aspect of all the images. Will there be a place where you can display all of these together? I imagine them arranged in neat rows like a yearbook, so you can take the time to let your eyes wander and pick up on all their intriguing individualities. Oh man, the Visual Arts major in me wants them to be in an installation where each one has a box below it where you can write a story about each person, etc...whee! |
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cutler:
sprice: Monitors are tricky beasts for this sort of stuff. I realized that even changing the angle at which I view images on the LCD monitor I use for this stuff alters the contrast. I guess maybe that's an argument against these newfangled flatscreen monitors; but they sure are great otherwise.
gabriel: You are right--one if my biggest technical quibbles with this image is how washed out his face is. When I was tweaking it I found I had to choose between detail in the face and detail in his sweater and in the wood background. When I originally scanned the picture his head and shirt collar were floating in a sea of blackness (which was pretty cool, actually). Anyhow, I think that the washed out face heightens the drama of the image a bit. . . it makes him look really pale, anyway.
tasha: I'm pretty excited by the "characters out of context" thing myself (I suppose I'd have to be since I don't know any of the people in these pictures. . . and I seem to be resisting posting the images that feature my relatives. I guess I'm worried that the thrill of seeing, for example, my dad as a college student will be lost on those who don't know him.) Your suggestion that I put all these crazy characters in one place is definitely in line with what I've been planning. When I build up a collection of images that I'm at least somewhat satisfied with I will probably put them on my website somewhere. I'll be sure to let you all know when I do. And, if I'm feeling ambitious, I'll set something up where folks can post descriptions of these characters. (ooh. . . the more I think about that, the more I like it. . .) |
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