On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 09:23:26AM -0500, frank theriault scripsit: > As per Paul's suggestion I brightened it just a bit and as per Brian's > suggestion I tried to get rid of a bit of the noise/grain. I'm still > not sure that I don't prefer the original, but I'd be interested to > know what you all think. > > http://knarfdummyblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/whisper-redux.html > > Original: > > http://knarfinthecity.blogspot.com/2009/12/whisper.html > > Your thoughts and comments are appreciated.
My problem with this particular photo is that the degree of, hrm, moderate murkiness gives it a sense of being old; these people are grandparents now. That takes away from the slice-of-life immediacy of the whole thing; the event depicted is a very immediate, right-this-second transitory event. There's a point to be made about yeah, that kind of right-this-second transitory event happened fifty years ago and five hundred years ago, too, but the specific camera-beyond-its-capabilities aesthetic starts to push the moment into a murkiness of potential meanings because the possible intended implications of the depiction are so much broader than the one little narrow moment being depicted. (Is this *ironic* reference to "it's been going on as long as people were people" or *non-ironic* reference to "it's been going as long as people were people"? Should the camera-beyond-its-limits aesthetic be understood as nostalgia, early aesthetic fixation, or a comment on the scope of the utility of technology? And so on.) I don't find your photos that lack the murkiness to do this, even when they're quite dark. I think this is because I take the murkiness as an assertion of the irrelevance of the chronological location of the moment depicted; "it doesn't matter when this happened". "It doesn't matter when this happened" is a lot of weight to put on the bar scene equivalent of "O HAI" and I don't think the moment in question is quite up to that. It's a fine and excellent moment; it's not plausibly a *robust* moment unless we know for sure that they are now grandparents with one another, and we don't know that, so the dislocation in time (to me) diminishes the effectiveness of the scene. -- Graydon, who figures that might well be more aesthetic peculiarity than you wanted -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
