Not my best shot by DPC standards but this is undoubtedly my favorite shot taken last year. Utter joy uninhibited! It makes me smile every time I look at it.
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Thank you.
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Place: 168 out of 429 Avg (all users): 5.8684 Avg (commenters): 8.0909 Avg (participants): 5.9938 Avg (non-participants): 5.2000 Views since voting: 1627 Views during voting: 365 Votes: 190 Comments: 35 Favorites: 10 (view)
And with the trusty little Lumix, no less! Your processing gave this breath. A beautiful photo to begin with, no doubt, but the way you painted it to give it life really really makes this shine.
WOW! this has finished way to far down the list! I didn't figure the voters would give it a ribbon but for crying out loud, if this is 170th then I should be in the 200s with mine.
I'm going through the entries, stopping at those images I feel have had the benefit of an unconventional eye and dwelling a little longer to try to see and appreciate what you saw. This is one of those images.
Positives: What a complete delight! I can't tell you how much I like this. It exudes complete confidence in your art; the slight blur, the low contrast - shouldn't work but really, really does. The model, the balloons, the leading line of the water trench. All so beautiful.
Critical stuff: Nothing (of course).
Overall: An image that has floored me with its quality and subtlety. Just amazing.
I’m a dedicated fan of low-fidelity photographs, and this one is especially wonderful. It’s a bold gesture to offer this up as your best of 2010, because it will be dismissed with barely a thought by many of the voters, and you’ll likely be finishing down in the DPC dungeon with me I suppose. But you clearly know that already.
My love of photographs like this one of yours is driven by two opposed but connected impulses.
First, digital photography has reached the point where almost anyone can make an impressive image by buying the equipment and then slavishly copying the style and techniques of already popular photographers. You see it in the forums all the time … “How can I get this look?” etc. There's often even a bloody 'action' to be downloaded to guarantee the outcome! The resulting photographs of course all appear much the same, and are a triumph of style over substance. They may indeed look impressive but individually most are ephemeral and ultimately of no artistic or even photographic consequence whatsoever.
Second, I prefer in any case photographs that make some demands, that require the viewer to get inside the picture and experience it from there; from within. Within both self and image. Only a photograph that is in some sense unfinished – or at least only partly realised – by the photographer is capable of achieving that, at least to my satisfaction. That means photographs that don’t conform to the tedious bloody rules, photographs that leave bits of the story outside the frame, and that render what’s inside the frame with some degree of considered negligence. With a lack of fidelity, in other words.
Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but the difference is that mine is right.
Ah, you want proof? Consider this: Look at almost any ribbon-winning image. Everything it has to offer is right there, unequivocal and complete. All of the potential experience of the image has already been had on your behalf, by the photographer; your job as its viewer is not to experience it at all, but simply to admire it. That’s all that’s been left for you.
Now look at this image, ‘Firework’, again. One could (and should) look at it a dozen times, and have a different experience each time. That’s because some of the photograph is indistinct, uncertain, ambiguous or even missing, and the job of the viewer is to add the incompletely articulated or missing stuff. And not just once; as many times and in as many ways as the photograph will allow.
That’s why I love low-fidelity photography, and it’s why this wondrous example of it is in my top two picks for the Best of 2010. Thank you.
The composition proves that a photo does not have to be tack sharp to effectively capture a mood or feel (7). The colors and the blur give me the sense of nostalgia. Remembering the carefree childhood days where running in the fields, jumping and playing was all that mattered. Her leap into the air holding the balloons project the sense of wonder and delight; perhaps there is the imagination of the ability to take flight. Now I do have two small critiques: I wish that there was a great separation of the girl from the fields because in some areas the skin tones blend with that of the fields (she would have visually popped more off of the sky). A lower angle of shooting would have accomplished that. Second is that I wish her leap was not captured so close to the stream for some creates a line that cuts into your subject. Hmmm, you know, it would I think it would have been a great leading line if you had the luck of capturing her leap where she was at the top end of the streamline. Then it would have acted as a leading line/path that lead the eye directly to her whereas here it cuts through her.
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