Black Hole

Critique Style Requested: Initial Reaction

Please share your immediate response to the image before reading the photographer’s intent (obscured text below) or other comments. The photographer seeks a genuinely unbiased first impression.

Questions to guide your feedback

Is it acceptable to expand on nature’s abstracts through creative seeing and processing.

Other Information

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Image Description

Following Beth Buelow’s NPN webinar this week, I ended up in a redwood forest to play with ICM and in-camera multi-exposure. One of the images that came out of this process enticed me with a burned out knot in a fallen tree with redwood leaves laying on the grayed log.

Technical Details

Rotated a 7-shot multi-exposure around the knot and processed according to some of the recommendations by Beth. I maintained the original shots and after initial processing brought them into Photoshop to blend on the dark mode — then processed the blended image .

Specific Feedback

Conceptually, blended multi-exposure images take an element of nature and turn it into something quite abstract. Does it work?


Critique Template

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Totally acceptable - for me the chaos of nature can only be borne by trying to enhance what meets the eye. This entails isolating interesting, and hopefully beautiful, patterns with the camera and passing these on to others. If a pattern happens to be a living organism, so be it, but it can just as well be an interesting/beautiful take on a part of one, as you have here. I just can’t make out if it’s vegetable or animal (I suspect vegetable). Creative processing expanding on your seeing? Sure! It looks like here your processing was mainly aimed at the colors. The end result: a very interesting abstract.

Thanks, Mike! One of the opportunities we have with today’s technology is to see a visual moment and play with it. We get to explore the individual creations in nature — now playing with the patterns, tones , colors, etc. Out of that process we are able to create something the eye may not initially see. While working with (and connecting with) a nature subject with these tools, we can create something different by moving those patterns while a sensor records the light. It becomes new and unique with each try!

My emphasis was more on the textures and patterns, creating an intriguing result for me (my wife thinks it is too ominous, which is where I got the title as “Black Hole”). Some of the subtle colors came out in processing with ACR, where I also pushed the textures.

At some point in time, I might share the initial scene I started with, although it might ruin the mystery of where the various elements come from.

I would like to do a shoutout to Beth Buelew’s NPN webinar this week on “Approaching Abstraction”, which stimulated me to go out and play.

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I haven’t a clue what the original subject of this image was, Harvey, which is very appropriate for an abstract. I like the fibrous look of most of the image and the general earth tones with just a touch of green and blue sneaking in. With that title, I thought you might take the center totally black, but I think this presentation works fine as posted.

This one works for me and you’re description of the process is interesting.

My initial reaction is that it’s like one of William Blake’s illustrations. I don’t know why I’m making that association.

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