The PhotoForum member's gallery/exhibit space was updated 15 March 03. Authors with work now on display at http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/gallery.html include:
D.L. Shipman -
Really nice sharpness, really nice color, the trumpet vine is one of my favorites and I'm happy to say one has taken hold in my yard too. There a very strong impression of horizontality in this presentation, and I think it's not as successful as something else. Been trying to figure out what else.... Perhaps shooting slightly more directly into the face of the stream of flowers? (move the camera down a little or tilt the flower spray up a little.)
Jeff Spirer - The Jungle Outside is the Jungle Inside
really nifty. Only the tiniest bit too yellow on my monitor.
Kostas Papakotas - rockin' socks
Wow! Yup. Them socks is a-rockin alright! Very excellent capture of colors, great sense of movement without falling back on the old blur trick. This is an excellent picture. I love the angle, too. Angle is another gimmick one has to use with great care and this does it wonderfully.
Les Baldwin - Fashion Portrait
Oh, so flat. There's no depth. She could be a womannikin. And such an uncomfortable looking position. She may actually be lying down, but she looks to me like she's sitting and bent over to the side so she can fit her head on the pillows. Maybe a hair light would help? And something to make her face look like it's got a chin and cheeks?
Fletcher Jernigan - My Neighbor's Tree
Oh, I'm so sorry. I hope it wasn't a healthy tree. I guess I would have cropped off the third of the image to the left side, so there was a strong diagonal between the stained glass and the guy in the cherry picker. Maybe even changed the angle so more of the stained glass had light passing through it. This might have brought the cherry picker up closer to the stained glass, which might have reinforced the story. It took a bit of looking to see more than that there was a tree there.
Christopher Strevens - Wasp eating leaf mites
Well, you definitely needed to pop some light in there near the "mouth" of the wasp. That would have helped the insert to correlate visually with the larger image. The mite is pretty neat in its transparency, but not very sharp. Was it a separate image? If so, how did you get the yellowjacket to stay still.....
Louis C. Smith - Glass object I
Beautiful creation, but how did you get it suspended in front of the bg? Neat trick, concealing that! I very much like the effect of the color palette of the bg as well. Lovely reverberations around in the glass. The composition, also, is very pleasing to me, the stretch of the dancer and parentheses curve shape and the way it fits inside the border. Generally, although I'm a blue/green/purple person, this is a very nice image to me. I'd call it "dancer" if you need a title.
John Lee - Tulips
poor things - just can't hold a candle to the painter's concept. Too real, and not decadent enough. The tulips are all uptight and the painting is all happy/wild. Did you shoot this again when the tulips were almost over, drooping and their petals hanging out? A cobalt pitcher would have reached out to the painting too.
King/Arthur - Assemblage
This is to me the most successful of the Haymarket series. It's always dark down there and going to be hard to get people to not blur without very fast film or additional light. People are always scurrying through Haymarket doing their business and moving on to make space for the next layer of customers behind them The awnings are often yellow, which creates that parchment yellow cast over the entire place. So I think it tells the story of the Haymarket accurately. But it's not a very happy image, so I'm not sure it would sell. (If that matters.)
Richard Cooper - Gone with the Wind
Just a lot of information in that photograph. At first I wondered, taking the hint of the title, whether it was the bridge that was gone now. Now that it's middling March for all I know it may be the frozen river that's no longer frozen. But one thing is clear, it's not the ice boater. S/he's frozen in place here and very visible.
Backing off from a preoccupation with the relevance of the title, I'd suggest trying out a vertical arrangment with about a third of the space behind the sailor and 2/3 in front, so the person at least had a visual space into which to go. Then a lot less foreground would be acceptable, since it's not really needed to convey information about the surface that the sailor is moving on. Finally, given that the weather didn't cooperate, I'd have pushed the contrast up a bit, so the ice was somewhat whiter and the turquoise boathull jumped out a bit as well.
Andrew Davidhazy - Muddy waters
Neat-o. I don't care how you did it, what you did to the color, it's just neat-o. What did it look like before you played with it?
I don't get the blues from that!
-- Emily L. Ferguson elf@cape.com 508-563-6822 New England landscapes, wooden boats and races, press photography Beetle cats on the web at: http://www.vsu.cape.com/~elf http://www.beetlecat.org/store.html#yrbook
