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Welcome to the new site. Here's a thread about the update where you can post your feedback, ask questions or spot those nasty bugs!
Just for Fun No C&C will be given: Jaguar (the 4-wheeled type)
- Thread starter Rajan Parrikar
- Start date
Asher Kelman
OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Rajan,
e car is indeed a work of art and the Canon 14mm 2.8L II is an excellent way of showing it up close. good job!
Asher
e car is indeed a work of art and the Canon 14mm 2.8L II is an excellent way of showing it up close. good job!
Asher
Ken Tanaka
pro member
Sorry, Asher, I don't agree here.
Looking at the other images on your blog, and the brief text, I have to ask why you chose to create such a cartoonish image of this car? It looks like you were trying to document your visit to this late writer's home and its contextual setting. Then we get to this third image of this car which you've made so outlandishly distorted by shooting close with that 14mm.
What was your thinking here? Just 'cuz you had a 14mm lens itchin' to be used? As the image is rendered by itself it's a little...well..."Look what I did"-ish. Crushing the darks and then adding the toning sauce really makes it look a bit immature. But, that aside. it's an image that mocks its subject, not at all in keeping with the somewhat sacred tone of your bloggy entry.
Huh?
Looking at the other images on your blog, and the brief text, I have to ask why you chose to create such a cartoonish image of this car? It looks like you were trying to document your visit to this late writer's home and its contextual setting. Then we get to this third image of this car which you've made so outlandishly distorted by shooting close with that 14mm.
What was your thinking here? Just 'cuz you had a 14mm lens itchin' to be used? As the image is rendered by itself it's a little...well..."Look what I did"-ish. Crushing the darks and then adding the toning sauce really makes it look a bit immature. But, that aside. it's an image that mocks its subject, not at all in keeping with the somewhat sacred tone of your bloggy entry.
Huh?
Rajan Parrikar
pro member
Ken,
I disagree with your assessment of the photograph. I consider it to be a well-made image, with exactly the effect I wanted.
Also, I use lenses deliberately and with an intent to create the look I want, not because they are "itching" to be used.
I disagree with your assessment of the photograph. I consider it to be a well-made image, with exactly the effect I wanted.
Also, I use lenses deliberately and with an intent to create the look I want, not because they are "itching" to be used.
Ken Tanaka
pro member
OK. So then can you discuss what propelled you to create this image and present it in the context of your blog narrative? What makes it a "well-made image"? What was your deliberation behind this effect? Perhaps I'm not supposed to be judging it within a context not explicitly presented here. But you provided a link to your article, so it does become context rather than "Look at this funny picture".
Am I challenging you? Yup.
Rajan Parrikar
pro member
The only straw you hang on to is the one regarding context. However, even here I won't concede your point, for a blog is generally understood to be a space for quick, informal, even desultory, dispatches. As I have said before, it is akin to thinking aloud, a first draft if you will.
As for your judging it - it is your prerogative, needless to add. I expect, indeed welcome, all kinds of reactions to what I post publicly, and not simply of the adulatory kind. Negative reactions sometimes help point me in a different direction, provoke new ideas etc (often in ways unintended by the reactor).
Asher Kelman
OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Yes Ken, I am guilty of immediate and even misinformed decisions. Remember, I'm British and to me there's a special relationship with this car. So the 14mm provides me with an intimate position to enjoy the car! It's almost as if there was a jigsaw piece missing and this fits perfectly.
Still, you're right about the context and motivation. That's the whjole basis for libel per quod where even a perfectly good picture can be in negative light when the editor places it in an inappropriate context.
So I'm glad you stand ready to hold the picture accountable to the world of the blog in where it had its home.
After all, a beautiful girl with a short skirt, 8" heels and a huge purse standing with like-dressed ladies under lamp light on a bridge in the seedy part of town, appears to be advertised for her body. Now tell me she's a highly regarded Vogue™ model, I'd want more of an explanation!
I overlooked any crushing of the blacks, I admit! Sentiment trumped craft!
Asher
Rajan Parrikar
pro member
Asher -
Note that the incongruous also has its place in Art, and can be a useful device to occasion frisson.
As for crushing the blacks around the car - I experimented with this a bit and finally decided the surroundings weren't adding to the image.
Note that the incongruous also has its place in Art, and can be a useful device to occasion frisson.
As for crushing the blacks around the car - I experimented with this a bit and finally decided the surroundings weren't adding to the image.
Asher Kelman
OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Andy brown
Well-known member
I'm compelled to post here but only to relate some reminisces.
When I was 18 years old and still at my folks place, my next door neighbours Stirling ( named after the British racing driver Stirling Moss) and his younger brother and I all owned Jags. Stirl had an Mk. 2 in British racing Green, Vaughn had a red 'S' type and I had a Mk 10 in gunmetal grey. We grew up in the working class suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. All the other young lads were thinking they were cool in their V8 Holdens and Fords.
We thought we were just a bit cooler in our old but smooth Jags and we probably were.
All that leather and bunished oak and flying down the highway at 110 miles an hour.
Luckily we all survived, they still own Jags. I've gone Japanese (Honda).
Wide angle shot of the 'Wah'? I don't like it. Jags have lines not to be messed with. Sorry Rajan.
When I was 18 years old and still at my folks place, my next door neighbours Stirling ( named after the British racing driver Stirling Moss) and his younger brother and I all owned Jags. Stirl had an Mk. 2 in British racing Green, Vaughn had a red 'S' type and I had a Mk 10 in gunmetal grey. We grew up in the working class suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. All the other young lads were thinking they were cool in their V8 Holdens and Fords.
We thought we were just a bit cooler in our old but smooth Jags and we probably were.
All that leather and bunished oak and flying down the highway at 110 miles an hour.
Luckily we all survived, they still own Jags. I've gone Japanese (Honda).
Wide angle shot of the 'Wah'? I don't like it. Jags have lines not to be messed with. Sorry Rajan.
Asher Kelman
OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
If one stood really close to this Jaguar and looked all over it and the mind assembled the vision from that proximity, this is what one would see! It's just perspective and how we have to see things. Of course, we move out eyes to acquire this much of a view. Still, I can get that close, and imagine the entire car just like this! I'm used to the concept adding slices to get even 3 D images. I am shown individual and sequential CT scan slices of the human body, and see entire structures in space, at a glance. So the car, in this view is not strange to me. Yes it's distorted! That doesn't stop a wild spree in the cathedral of my mind. So, for me, at least, lack, that it misses the grace we are used to, is besides the point!
Now what was in Rajan's mind might very well have been the mischief of owning a 14mm lens! We do not know. I did not think of that at all! This kind of use, if it happened, reminds me of the "Philadelphia Mallet Rule". A professor once pondered on the stone age man's first discovery of the potential of a mallet. "From then on, everything within reach needed to be hit with it!"
Bringing my own imagination to Rajan's picture evoked my own personal experience. I instantly recovered visions of the speedway races, rallies, all the showrooms and collections I have seen, the cars I've driven and even the E-Type, smashed by a train as it was stuck on a railways crossing in in Harare, Zimbabwe. I look at the picture and have the joy of getting so close and personal to this admirable classic car. So I have had no problems with the use of the 14mm lens, whatever the validity of Rajan's intent, in the first place!
I admit, that in the context of the collection of all images from the visit to the location, I'm, now, not at all surprised that Ken was immediately influenced by that context and so his conclusion was visceral and even logical.
That's why, in real estate, the words, "Location, location, location!" are in the ears if buyers, sellers and the agents. That's why curators carefully manage how they show collections.
The take-home lesson here is that it's our responsibility to show images in such a way that we allow the reaction we would like to be most possible.
Asher
Alain Briot
pro member
I personally like this photograph of a Jaguar MK2. The challenge when photographing cars is to make them look interesting, meaning go beyond what the car looks like and move towards how we emotionally respond to the car.
I photograph quite a few cars myself, even though it is not my main focus, and I have found that using uncommon perspectives, croppings as well as extreme lenses and positioning myself higher or lower than eye level works great in regard to what I can do in the field.
Sometimes a wide angle induces overindulgence in distorting things for no reason. However, sometimes a wide angle is just what is needed to express what you want to say. I think that in this instance we are looking at the second of these two options.
I photograph quite a few cars myself, even though it is not my main focus, and I have found that using uncommon perspectives, croppings as well as extreme lenses and positioning myself higher or lower than eye level works great in regard to what I can do in the field.
Sometimes a wide angle induces overindulgence in distorting things for no reason. However, sometimes a wide angle is just what is needed to express what you want to say. I think that in this instance we are looking at the second of these two options.
Alain Briot
pro member
Rajan,
Thank you for introducing me to Halldór Laxness. I had never heard of him until I read your post here. He is a very interesting author.
Alain
Thank you for introducing me to Halldór Laxness. I had never heard of him until I read your post here. He is a very interesting author.
Alain
Mark Hampton
New member
Alan - Rajan
I don’t often agree with you - but I do on this.. I have no nostalgic attachment to this car or any other cars .. what I think works in this image is the distortion - the car seem to exploded like the cat on it bonnet from a point we cannot see. a slightly lower angle may help push the image a little more.
I cant really comment on the sepia - i use tones - I do think the background either has be there or not -
if it were my image I may get rid of the road / background - give the car more negative space and watch it leap ! then again i would problem split the car in two .. flip it back to front and put a big redaction through a key part of the image !!
I am not an expert on car photography btw.