Green Gecko wrote:Suffocate Peon wrote:oh god i made a thread on dpreview and put up 13 photos. They're saying i should brighten them up and that the underexpose is a gimmick. The response is otherwise positive but then it isn't is it because the reason to darken some and high contrast others couldn't be more obvious. At some point it goes beyond personal taste and you enter the realms of denseness. Class! Can anyone tell me why the photographer might have darkened the image and highlighted the white in contrast to the different tones to increase the unnerving mood and mystery oh god ive given you the answer class dismissed.
Showing people anything anymore is so disappointing it basically at this point is a deep fear i have. I mean i expect nothing else. At this point art to me is like something personal and precious and bringing it up emphasises the disconnection. It'd be like if every conversation with anyone you ever had included them at any point saying 'i'm a tory'. You'd die a little inside multiple times a day wouldn't you?
My photo was cropped. Cropped! They took out the smoker's legs and the row of papers to the left. i mean i just don't even the cigarette is white cigarettes are white tones mood cigarettes are pure white cigarettes are pure white the wall is grey because cigarettes are white the looming face is meant to be shrouded in darkness because it is a looming face and cigarettes are white and the papers are a neat touch that contextualises the photo and adds more degree of tone and cigarettes are white you don't have a white cigarette against a white wall because cigarettes are white the photo is cut into three pieces the man's silhouette cuts it up he's black because the cigarette is strawberry floating white
Dude, who gives a strawberry float about those guys. The problem is you forgot who your audience is. Dpreview is a forum for intense tongue waggling about minute differences between minor revisions in the same SLR released over and over again, they are going to attack you on every possible technical front because they have an image in their mind of the perfect image. Which is itself an intense, absurd, total fallacy, so why bother acknowledging any reference to it? It's literally a waste of your time and energy, and theirs.
If what you are producing is art, you're not going to get a critique that is useful to you. You should put it in a gallery, or Instagram, or your own website or whatever and just let people say whatever they want. Stop caring.
I'll repeat that. You're not going to get a critique that is
useful to you.
Cropping your photo is a dick move. They're probably upset that your photos are more interesting than a thousand photo of a beach or sunset or bird or whatever boring gooseberry fool. Seriously strawberry float them. Nerds.
I missed this earlier yesterday.
This isn't about just one thread on dpreview..i'm not that sensitive..it would include deviantart, rllmuk, real life. I've thought about this a lot, an awful lot. Just to find the time and motivation and be satisfied is enough, why does it matter?
It just occurred to me lately that it's about absorbing myself so fully into something and not being able to share it with others, in terms of being like; this is strawberry floating great isn't this strawberry floating great. It's not about a stuffy kind of aloof response, i can tell when the pure..cerebral rawness of them gets under their skin and they get a kick on that level. Really for this it only needs one person to feel it, but what I'm starved of is legitimacy.
It kills me to show people and for it to mean nothing-nothing. If you're a struggling comedian barely getting by you might doubt whether you'll ever get a break but you're at least on stage in a live setting. If you're in a band, maybe you don't come out with anything after a tour, and not doing exactly the music you want, and are average..but just doing a tour is success in itelf. An amazing thing. If the purpose and meaning of the stuff I'm doing is refused to be engaged with then it ceases to exist as anything.
This is the way something i put everything into is viewed: weird. Bordering on mentally ill. Taking photos of random people, what the strawberry float are you doing? At no point are they thinking; strawberry floating hell, you're very into this, clearly digging deep to express yourself through this medium. Because that's not the way they see photography or art in general. Photos have to be of things clearly defined things, and drawings have to be in pencil of a person.
I'll show people and look at how they respond. I can see something is happening but also see a refusal to engage. I'm not attaching themes like an attempt to get higher marks in GCSE coursework, the mood is consistent. To transform is fun anyway, but it is meant to capture the alienation of modern life, people reduced to vacant despondent stark forms lost in a void of black. It is meant to express depression and loneliness, it is meant to be aggressive and nihilistic, treat the human body violently - not as an attack on them but an expression of modern life's toil on them viewed through a modern lens, caused by excessive work, excessive consumption.
Work is shown as hell. Consumerism is not captured as a good thing that brings you happiness but as an illness, you paralysed in this anxious state, alone, surrounded by logos and signs, your body cut into a shape that looks like it's being pulled in conflicting directions at once. I'm not grasping..i resent a lot of modern life. I like cities for the range of people moving about independently, i like that they're lived in, worn, the old buildings among the new, the way things are built on top, around, over each other.
My photos upset my family when i show them, it's genuinely like opening up my brain and showing the darkness inside. It shouldn't be, it should be; you've done well there, IF you acknowledge the legitimacy of it and value it. We're really living through a time of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing though.
back to dpreview..yeah they didn't like me questioning their monitors...don't question a calibrated monitor.