Shot out my car window on my way to work; simple, isolated subject against a nicely-textured batch of clouds.
Cropped and rotated. Used two RGB curves to enhance the contrast, channel mixer to convert to grayscale; one pass with USM.
I decided to go gray partly because of the nature of the challenge, and partly to resist using a more highly-colorized version if I went with a color version ...
ALternate or subtitles for this were "Wave of the Past" and "TV's Cloudly Future."
Statistics
Place: 156 out of 169 Avg (all users): 4.0816 Avg (commenters): 3.6667 Avg (participants): 4.1753 Avg (non-participants): 3.9899 Views since voting: 1628 Votes: 196 Comments: 10 Favorites: 0
I'm a sucker for cloudscapes too, and one reason I went B+W was to put more emphasis on the silhouette aspect rather than make it a nice cloudscape with an antenna in the way.
Oh yes, now that I see the color ones, B&W was the right way to go for the challenge.
But I must say that I love the simple color "adjusted" one. We just don't get great clouds here in LA like that ... I'd have to go to the high desert for a storm or something.
My Opinion: As a pure work of photographic art, I think the shot could benefit from color. I'm a sucker for cloudscapes and majestic skies. I might like to see it recropped in color to highlight the feeling of the ship at sea corner of the building part.
Thanks for the review! I agree with about all of it, and considered color versions as you can see below. I'm a sucker for cloudscapes too, and one reason I went B+W was to put more emphasis on the silhouette aspect rather than make it a nice cloudscape with an antenna in the way.
I'm not sure why it was so grainy; I was in shadow at the time while it was pretty bright around the subject area, so maybe that affected the exposure or focus.
I wish I had thought of the ship metaphor -- perhaps titling it Bowsprit could have bumped it up a tenth ...
Composition: The subject of this photo seems to be the antenna on the rooftop. Its position within the photo gives it a position of focus, since the foreground is dark and the background is so light. It sits at the edge of the roofline like the mast of a ship. The framing of the antenna could be closer for the purposes of the challenge to highlight the negative nature of the wire against the light background.
Background: The background of the spectacularly tumbling clouds really makes the photo work. The sky beyond that is lost in the black and white choice.
Camera Work: (Focus/DOF/Exposure) - the graininess is distracting, as I think the clouds woudl really pop with a crisp photo.
Post Processing: The grainy treatment and the black and white are subjective choices. The antenna and challenge subject of silhouettes I think benefit from the decoloring.
My Opinion: As a pure work of photographic art, I think the shot could benefit from color. I'm a sucker for cloudscapes and majestic skies. I might like to see it recropped in color to highlight the feeling of the ship at sea corner of the building part.
If you found my comments helpful, please let me know. If you have any other comments, please feel free to PM me. texttext
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.
