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
Dancing in the dark
Shadows enveloping light
Soul’s embrace, love blooms.
I would be most interested as to whether you feel the image has “an emotional hook” or in any other way, the extent to which you are impacted.
Other Information
Please leave your feedback before viewing the blurred information below, once you have replied, click to reveal the text and see if your assessment aligns with the photographer. Remember, this if for their benefit to learn what your unbiased reaction is.
Image Description
Probably my favourite picture from this past year, it is part of a much larger project that I hope to continue working for at least another five to ten years. However, phase one will include somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30 photographs, this being one of them. All were taken hand-held and all in B&W. I plan to submit phase one of the collection to LensWork for publication, but who knows.
Technical Details
The expression of the man facing us says it all to me, Kerry. At the same time, the rather dark tonality of the image has an opposite feel for my taste (reminds me of old B&W dark dramas). An interesting contrast.
I’m learning to really like street photography a lot. I don’t even know if this is correctly called street photography but it’s close enough for me. I’m always amazed how they are able to get such good composition from moving subjects. The whites and blacks seem so balanced. The main points in my opinion are the man’s expression and the two hands held in a muscular clench. Those two points tell what this story is about for me.
There is a marvellous, brilliant book by John Vaillant called “The Tiger”. In it he compares predator to prey. Prey has the simpler job since they only have to react to threat and let instinct take over. But the predator has to anticipate the future. A tiger, for example, has to anticipate where prey animals are likely to show up and then be at that place well before they do (sometimes days, sometimes weeks). A tiger, in other words, has vision but even then, the tiger, who is at the absolute pinnacle of the food chain, is successful in the hunt less than 20% of the time. In a real sense, that also describes a street photographer, don’t you think?
Thanks for your very positive comments. This, as I said, is part of a project I’m putting together. In this first phase there will be 25-30 photographs included. I’m already on my third draft as I edit photographs out and insert others. I think I’m getting close to bringing phase one to where I’d be ready to show it to LensWork and see what they think.
How exciting! This is a new direction for you isn’t it? Most of your images have been lanscapes up until now. Perhaps that’s because NPN is geared towards the world of nature and that’s what we see.
BTW ambush predators hunt that way. Wolves just run their prey down. Others just wait. But I get your point about anticipation.
