Flight
Comments: 17
I used to think silhouettes were a bit cheesy but at last I may be beginning to see the point of them. They really do inflict a rigorous simplicity: you get two colours and a bunch of shapes — now make something. If you’ve been feeling that your composition skills need honing, you might try shooting silhouettes on your next early evening walk (this picture may be more simplistic than simple, but I’ll stand by my advice and keep trying).
I should offer a word of thanks to that crow for not going into one of those low swooping take-offs they do and instead fleeing upwards when I shifted my weight onto my front foot in the hope that it would think I was coming after it and so fly away. This was the last shot on the card and I was glad of the cooperation. I was also grateful that someone left that gate open once upon a time (this picture was taken somewhere I was not supposed to be and I don’t think that gate had been touched for many years).
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Posted to Photographs • 2004.02.11 (Wed) • 21:54
Comments
Posted by Reinier 2004.02.11, 22:42
Euh, Wow, just so beautifull !
Posted by ste 2004.02.11, 22:50
Wow, that’s an amazing shot.
Posted by Stefan 2004.02.12, 00:01
Excellent photo !
What interests me, was this photo digitally worked on or is this coming straight out of the camera.
Please forgive me, I´m a photgraphic beginner and do not want to question or belittle your skills, I am just interested in what is possible and how it can be achieved.
Greetings
Stefan
Posted by ari 2004.02.12, 00:44
What a pic! Thanks for your nice pictures and comments!
Posted by michelle 2004.02.12, 00:56
that’s a lovely shot……
Posted by Chris Stoffel 2004.02.12, 01:13
For those who have not been to Tokyo, the crows are generally considered to be big, obnoxious pests. They are quite large and quite loud. Taking what everyone else would consider a nuisance and making it look so majestic is what I call true art. Great work!
Posted by TheDon 2004.02.12, 01:27
I love crows and ravens and through some reading over the years have discovered that they are likely the most intelligent bird species alive today.
Sadly, I rarely find beautiful photographs of them because of how they are typically viewed.
I’ll get to the point. This is a fantastic photograph. The colour, the composition and the subject matter are all stunning.
P.S. Nice “rule of thirds” composition!
Posted by pao 2004.02.12, 02:11
again… wow. how i wish i can see things through your eyes even for one day.
Posted by matthew 2004.02.12, 03:57
lovely. i love the rhythm of the squares, rectangles and diamonds.
Posted by pixelkitty 2004.02.12, 07:04
This ia beautiful photo Jeremy. The sunsets over there at the moment are spectacular. All we get here in Melbourne is drab grey.
Posted by Jeff Lawson 2004.02.12, 11:25
Incredible shot (talk about luck getting the crow in the frame). The color reminds me of a shot I took back in September:
Posted by jh 2004.02.12, 21:00
Stefan —-
> and do not want to question or belittle your skills
I didn’t take it this way at all! Every photograph has post-production work done to it. Printing in a darkroom involves making choices in a similar way that choices are made in Photoshop. Even one-hour kiosk development and printing is imposing post-production choices. The idea that photographs come fully-formed from the camera is a myth.
The art of photography has several parts, two of which are capturing the ‘raw materials’ and then using what you captured to make a picture. Similar to cooking in a way: a good cook can choose fine ingredients in season and then use his or her skill to prepare a meal from them. For me, this combination of processes is the interesting thing.
This picture had quite a bit of work done to it. It was rotated slightly (I wanted the fence lines to be absolutely straight because to me they represent the human element, and the boringly orthogonal planes we’re limited to —- a cliché I know, but that’s what was in the frame ;-). It was also cropped to get rid of some extraneous detail.
I adjusted the tonal range so that the blacks were really black. The sky is all cloud (the sun, shining through a gap, is setting 45° left of the camera and flooding the bank with light) and this tonal adjustment allowed me to flatten out the cloud shapes so that the sky appears more solid (remember, I want the picture to be as simple as possible and the cloud puffiness, only slight to begin with, was nonetheless distracting).
This didn’t quite punch up the orange enough I thought, so I increased the saturation +6.
In the original there was a beautiful band of darker cloud across the top of the image, but the crop left only a smudgy hint of this in the top right, so I removed it and then burned right across the top of the sky to close it off and create a balance with the slightly darker band down by the horizon. This also helps to reinforce the basic ‘rule of thirds’ composition that TheDon mentioned.
After resizing the picture I sharpened it a little, added the 1px black keyline, and then it was ready for posting.
TheDon —-
I read somewhere that crows are as intelligent as the average dog (perhaps not quite up there with border collies but certainly way smarter than Afghan hounds). They’ve learned the garbage schedules in Tokyo, so when it’s trash day in Ginza, they gather in Ginza. Some of them systematically shut down the Odakyu Line last year by repeatedly putting stones on the tracks, but I’m not sure the reason was ever discovered (I have a vague memory that the train passed by a stand of trees where they were nesting).
pixelkitty —-
A friend told me the other day that Tokyo is one of the top cities for sunlight. I can easily believe it in the winter, but our grey days are coming soon. Rainy season is enough to turn you against the world here. Sorry to hear the weather’s not so good in Melbourne, but I’m taking all the sunny days I can get before the soggy season arrives.
Posted by Stefan 2004.02.13, 03:39
Thanks very much for this interesting explanation of this photo :-)
Posted by Massimo Fiorentino 2004.02.14, 01:18
Bloody brilliant!!!
Posted by Bassett 2004.02.15, 08:10
That’s the best explantion of photography I’ve heard in many a while. When travelling, German tourists often ask me to “make” a picture for them while they stand infront of Mt Taranaki, Wellington’s Beehive, or wherever. Annoying choice of words on the tourists’ part, if you’re a Brit, Aussie or Kiwi: surely you “take a picture”? Now, thanks to JH, I get an angle on why using “make” would be appropriate. Still going use “take” though…
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens 2004.02.16, 09:09
I’m glad you explained your process. I never understand people who take pride in images or words that are unprocessed, happy accidents which display no skill or art, which my dictionary defines as “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination esp. in the production of aesthetic objects”.
Whether an image is manipulated in Photoshop or in the photo lab, or by your choice of film or lens or focal stop, or in how you compose the photo, or crop it afterward doesn’t matter. These are tools. It’s what one produces with the tools that counts, the conscious choices that set one apart.
Whatever tools you use, your gift is in seeing what others do not see and revealing, communicating that unseen world. An artist is the person who makes us look twice—and you always do that.
Posted by absoluteyi 2004.02.28, 13:15
you are really a lucky guy
see these pictures ,also amazing :http://www.blogcn.com/user8/absoluteyi/main.asp?id=1102766
guess you’ll like them
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