Thoughts on what's popular these days

[Creagerj]

I was going to try to say something meaningful, but then my brain just froze up. I think it is safe to say that those getting started in photography have a somewhat distorted idea of what makes for a good photograph. For a lot of people, a good photograph is over saturated, ultra vivid color, unrealistic sharpness, and bizarrely smooth skin. I may have subscribed to this camp at some point in time as well, at leas to some extent. I used to be a big fan of very colorful images, although now I find that I am more concerned with content. It would be interesting to get a group of photo noobs together and have them evaluate some of photography's greats against modern advertising and pop photography. I can imagine that Ansel Adams would still be rated quite well, but those like Stiglitz, and Bresson probably not so much.

 

[peterm1]

Duplicated post

 

[peterm1]

I agree with the generally negative comments made about this image particularly the over use of HDR that is so prevalent today.. But to me the real problem is lack of proper composition.

There is no real subject. If the colored lantern doodads are the subject he intends us to concentrate on, then he should have focused in on these closely enough to fill the frame with a pattern of their color and shapes and nothing else. That might have been interesting.

If the tourists were the real subject he should have focused more on these - But here he has chopped the closest guy off at the hips and removed the back of the lady next to him. In short they are positioned all wrong - too far to the left as if they are an after thought. At least had he used the rule of thirds properly to position the human subjects where they should be he would have presented us with a more balanced image.

My preferred take might have been to just get the closest guy in the image and to change my position so that the image comprises only him looking at the colored lanterns (if that's what they are) and nothing else. As it is, the image is kind of a mish-mash of everything and nothing in particular - only God awful color.

Had the photographer done any of those things it would have been a better image and the truly awful colors would not have been so intrusive. There is too much of this HDR cack on Flickr and too often its rated highly by people who do not know better.

His other images are not really that much better to my way of thinking. Perhaps the one with the light beams may be OK, (but definitely would have been much much better in black and white with some of the shadows emphasized rather than obliterated by HDR) and the one with the heads and scarfs could have been much improved if he did something similar to what I suggested above - fill the frame with row on row of heads and scarfs rather than including the grumpy looking shop assistant in the bottom corner.

Loved the comment "If my eyes could vomit." Priceless.

 

[not_in_good_order]

I think that if you take away all the post processing, the basic composition of the image has merit, but the bizarre color and extreme haloing around any bit of detail really makes this image look terrible.

 

[Chris101]

Perhaps the cacophony of colors, shapes and choices was the subject. If so, I'd say he captured it nicely.

 

[M4cr0s]

This is not HDR (moving objects, go figure), but it might be pseudo-hDR (from one RAW. pushed and pulled in Photomatix). There's a few other possibilities that are more likely however, and they all deal with contrast adjustments within certain tonal/brightness ranges. This look is very easy to achieve by going nuts with the sliders in shadows/highlights in PS, or by (ab)use of one of many plugins for adjusting tonal contrast.

Curiously enough, I've seen press photographers (or their retouchers) starting to use this technique lately. IMHO halos just don't look good, but I notice that "people" seem to like it... Frankly I hate halo-ridden low-contrast images and even though I often do some pretty heavy tweaking in PS, I will go to extreme lengths to get rid of unwanted halos (even cloning them out).

/Mac

 

[VinceC]

Halo's were pretty common back the darkroom printing days. Had a colleague who used the phrase "seeing god" when referring to over-dodged faces on news photos.

 

[parsec1]

Its awful.