Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Shore, unsure
I really can't decide about this picture. It has been sitting around on my desktop for the better part of a week since I processed it. It hasn't made it to my picture-a-day blog. But when I come to discard it, I can't.
Now, is this the most boring picture you've seen this month, or does it have something, even if a modest something, going for it?
Permalink / posted by and copyright of Colin [auspiciousdragon.net] : 7:29 PM
Comments:
It's not the most boring but it isn't the most exciting either. If it were boring I would have dismissed it already. I'm giving it some thought so I don't reckon it is boring.
There is a highlight 'sparkle' right slap bang in the centre of the OoF foreground. That keeps pulling my eye down to it away from what little detail I can find in the image.
I also cannot be sure what the objects are in surf, there is insufficient detail there to satisfy my eye.
So not boring, not exciting, curious.
I'ts not necessarily boring but it doesn't satisfy me despite one virtue. The latter is that it captures the movement of the water very well. One fault is that you have managed to make it seem as though the water is coming uphill towards the camera: an optical illusion but disconcerting. Next, the foreground wave is too large a part of the picture to be OOF (despite the sparkle) when, as Rex says, there isn't enough detail anywhere. It's possible that a photo of this nature would work in colour with the many differing hues that would probably be there.
I find this unsettling, so in that sense, it's not a boring photograph. Placing the swimmers in the background instead of the foreground reverses our expectations for a shoreline shot. It emphasizes just how small the swimmers really are.
Swimmers? I thought that they were rocks and on closer examination might be persuaded that two are seals!
My first thought was that they were seals. The image has a sort of submarinal thing going on, showing a kind of periscope view of the seascape. Why anyone would want to torpedo seals I have no idea.
Any image that can provoke that kind of thought, bizarre as it might be, certainly has a little something going for it.
The sea is this vast expanse of space and energy yet this picture seems cramped and gentle. The out-of-focus bottom is too much of the picture. The middle is vey calm and boring. The top is two post tops and a dolphin. To me that's the picture but as it's too crammed in at the top it begins to frustrate me.
Thanks for the comments everybody. This never did make my blog........
A couple of points:
The seals/dolphins/swimmers are just the top of a, mostly submerged, dyke.
John E: the water is coming uphill! Isn't that the nature of waves and beaches?
Rex: if this is a photo of anything, it is a photo of that sparkle. You ought to see how boring the frame before is when I missed the sparkle!
akikana: you put this better than I could. The dyke creates a contradictory space.
Anyway, the camera failed a few moments after this, so I'll never know whether there was a better photo to be had.
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There is a highlight 'sparkle' right slap bang in the centre of the OoF foreground. That keeps pulling my eye down to it away from what little detail I can find in the image.
I also cannot be sure what the objects are in surf, there is insufficient detail there to satisfy my eye.
So not boring, not exciting, curious.
Any image that can provoke that kind of thought, bizarre as it might be, certainly has a little something going for it.
A couple of points:
The seals/dolphins/swimmers are just the top of a, mostly submerged, dyke.
John E: the water is coming uphill! Isn't that the nature of waves and beaches?
Rex: if this is a photo of anything, it is a photo of that sparkle. You ought to see how boring the frame before is when I missed the sparkle!
akikana: you put this better than I could. The dyke creates a contradictory space.
Anyway, the camera failed a few moments after this, so I'll never know whether there was a better photo to be had.