(Putting It All Together)
Student's Thoughts while on assignment:
Rick,
Here's my final pics! I had alot of fun with them but just can't pic ONLY 5. You've been doing a great job picking for my other Lesson's I thought I'd leave these up to you too! Look forward to your crits!
Buckingham Barn
Repoussoir! That is using something at the edge of the frame to effectively create a sense of depth (as you have with this full facade). That little bit of negative space (jagged window cut showing green foliage) really dances back and forth in my mind. It looks, actually, like it is a mirror reflecting foliage. At times I read it very much in the foreground, then it jumps to the background. As you completely framed it with that black interior shadowed wall, it takes on great powers of illusion! The facade coloring in red and green makes a great, simple color story. [you are doing your homework!] Also, red and green, though subtly used, are color opposites and that always packs some graphic punch. A soft almost pastel palette due to overcast light subdues the textures of the wood and makes this very much about the panels of color and interrelationships. Nice inclusion of the black pipe at lower left to break up all the linear design!
Broad Street
Another fun, and simple, but well composed image. One-color image! These could work very well for our earlier lesson on Color. Like many of your images, you don't rest with just the one-shot bit of wonder (that critically places "star" swathed in red), and you ADD more complexity. The lace-line shadows, for instance, build on the texture of that bumpy black rusting metal. Depth-of-field is shallow and that keeps our attention on the plane and decorate qualities of that rusting metal. Can rust be decorative? Of course! Also, you really set us up for that shock or red by keeping the rest of the image held in monochrome tones.
Spring Garden Street
Maybe my favorite of the set. Almost, well, really achieving escape velocity. That is, getting beyond just the delightful and surgical control of color and composition, and mixing in mood/ighting/emotion/mystery. That is where it really is at, in the best images, that is employing all your technical skill, but then, now and again, hopefully more and more regularly, infusing come conceptual notion. Getting a real sense of space, illusion, confusion. Getting beyond just the physical facts and into story/expression. I like this one very much. I would love to see it in a print to really get my head around it. Screen images are always limited in resolution. If this is sharp, you really have a nice one. The color story is really RED but in very muted tones, with that shock of stronger red in sunlight on the ground. Blue is the other color and Blue is actually a split complementary color that has some of the graphic power of a pure complementary relationship, but tends to slightly tone down the scene. Good exposure too.
Up
Like most of others, I continue to like how you really play around with form. Most of what you do takes the scene as purely building blocks, and then, like a Lego-artist, you use bits of this, bits of that, and slowly construct your own personal vision of the scene. I know many photographers would have excluded the lamp, considering it a distraction and having "nothing" to do with skyscrapers. That fact is, you have kind of made it an equivalent form—asking questions about its height. Does it go all the way up 65 stories? I like your awareness of the negative space of the blue sky as well. Blue buildings on blue sky, either because of the cool nature of the blue shadows, or blue windows and reflected blue light. Philly looks so clean and sharp-edged. Worth noting too is the color complements of orange/blue for the extra unexpected POP.
Chestnut Street
While this image doesn't have the color complexity, I really like the direction. Working to make a story in monochrome by using full color. I hope you don't mind, but I took the liberty of crafting some more intense contrast to subtly bring out the blue in the shadow. So, the images takes on some more details and dimension and we start to really feel the cracks and crevices, peeling paint, sandy bumps, rounded plaster mounds. I like the composition, but would love a bit more exploration. It does not feel quite as resolved as some of the others in this final series set, but still has many good ideas. I feel you didn't quite know what to do with it, but found it to be a really cool subject.