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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
9/13/2004 5:13:01 PM
Easy -- saw this from the road, parked the car on the shoulder, scrambled down the bank, stood on some rotten branches, fell like a sack of potatoes when they broke yet kept my camera safe (I can grow new skin but not a new Canon), stepped carefully out into the shallow swamp, holding on to a small tree, and made the photo. Fun!
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
9/3/2004 5:40:44 PM
Sorry I was preoccupied. I'll repeat what I may have said elsewhere, that this approach to landscape is, to use an overworked word, *deeper* than your 35mm work. Not that the 4x5 necessarily adds depth, but it does add effort, and I suspect that slowing down the picture-taking procedure makes photographers more reflective. Anyway, I believe I've noticed several stages or (as art-history majors are wont to say)"periods" in your scenic work. The early Elan II photos are of course well seen and well shot, but they tend to look like postcards or calendar shots, with dramatic lighting and wide horizons. Later (EOS 3?) photos have fewer horizons, more attention to detail and composition and adventitious color (stray leaves, highlights in water, etc), and subtler, often flatter, lighting. Then there are the recent 4x5's, usually B&W, where you see nature in a less idealized, less prettified way, its beauty being more the beauty of a grandmother with lined face and glowing smile, less the beauty of a pretty girl who hasn't yet had to deal with kids and in-laws and bad news from the nursing home.
That's what's in this photo, with those "ugly" dead trees laid out like pick-up sticks, no color at all, flat lighting, no drama, the S-curve of the river broken by rocks and sandbanks. It's not idealized at all -- nor is it real, since it's a photograph, an image whose appeal is less obvious yet more firmly rooted than that of a "prettier" picture. Because it's rooted in experience, and assumes that viewers are reflective and already have the level of understanding we expect from adults.
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| Photo By: Cleeo Wright
(K:565)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
9/3/2004 5:25:50 PM
I'm curious -- can anyone tell me the purpose of the netting that was draped over this van? It was part of the crowd-control police effort.
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
9/1/2004 2:42:26 PM
Thanks to all. Note that I don't mean these photos to be taken as advocacy one way or another, though I do have strong feelings in one direction. Politics, even when it's a matter of life and death, is of little moment. After all, life and death are important only to those involved. Everybody lives until he dies, and that's it.
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
9/1/2004 2:28:45 PM
Tangential remarks: The sign handles were cardboard tubes, useless as weapons. As protests go, this was *very* polite on both sides. The police cleared areas with "Please," "Sir" and "Thank you" and, when large groups didn't move, "Work with me, people!" If one marcher galled another's kibe, he excused himself. A few people marched with their babies, a few with dogs. I saw one with his cat. Of course generic insults were chanted, especially when the march halted for fifteen minutes or so directly in front of the entrance to Madison Square Garden, and fingers were raised in gestures usually seen only in bad traffic. But a sense of humor ruled. The news mentioned some arrests, but I personally saw none. As far as I could tell nothing bad went down, and I was in the march's leading edge. Nothing was thrown. Nobody was grabbed or pushed. There wasn't a whiff of riot gas. Nobody went where we weren't supposed to go. The orange-shirted organizers did a good job in close consultation with the police.
All of which surprised me -- nay, shocked me. I lived in New York through the worst of the 60's and all of the 70's. The protest marches (and police action) of those days were quite different. Remembering them, I went to this march with some misgivings, wearing a throwaway wrist watch, carrying a fabric wallet with two pieces of picture ID and medical insurance card, and using my cheapest camera. This turned out to be laughably paranoid. I've felt more threatened at a football game.
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
9/1/2004 11:05:24 AM
Jose: Not a crime really, just police barricades blocking off a street for last Sunday's protest march against the policies of President Bush.
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
9/1/2004 2:36:48 AM
Richard D.: I hope you'll be posting some photos when it's over. I've almost finished Photoshopping my 8/29 takes and putting them up on my website, starting at this page: http://www.quinbus.net/gallery/04_August?&page=5
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
8/30/2004 2:45:50 PM
Ian -- There are a couple of ironies in the photo. The major irony is the way the protest signs blend into the other ads. A minor one is that the biggest sign is for Fox News, Fox being a Bush-friendly broadcast channel. The protestors were chanting, "Fox News sucks."
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
8/30/2004 11:07:19 AM
PS: The shark was a happy stroke of luck. We were passing by the movie house on 34th Street that's showing the feature cartoon "Sharks."
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
8/30/2004 11:03:22 AM
Amen. The best chant used by the protestors was, "This is what democracy looks like." The cops, at least those policing the event, were professional, un-threatening, and did a great job. Ditto for the marshals and organizers of the march.
I'll be posting more of the same this week, all from Sunday's protest. Back to work for me today.
Many thanks to all for the kind words.
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
8/30/2004 10:58:47 AM
Whatever one's politics, the convention will make for some great photo-ops.
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
8/30/2004 10:57:01 AM
Yes, it tickled me that the camera's held like a shoulder-fired weapon of some sort, and that the camera, Borg-like, replaces the photographer's head.
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
8/30/2004 3:44:53 AM
I'd better not make any comments that could be construed as political. I did come to the conclusion that I'll never again try to use a Canon S-50 (or -60 or -70) for this kind of work. I got plenty of pictures of my feet, the sidewalk, the sky, etc, since the camera seems to take the shutter release as a hint or suggestion rather than a command to open release the shutter NOW. Delay was often at least half a second.
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
8/25/2004 3:15:22 AM
Thanks. I was consciously trading any detail in the whites for that pearly luster.
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
8/13/2004 4:53:07 PM
Beautiful, certainly, but still from your National Geographic period -- anyway, not as impressive to me as your later, subtler, less dramatic, more lyrical work. Anyone on this spot at this hour of the day would be bowled over by the scenery; but your subtler shots are of things seen in a personal light, things that wouldn't be obvious to every sightseer, or every photographer.
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| Photo By: Cleeo Wright
(K:565)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
8/11/2004 3:14:57 AM
Thanks; that echo of Picasso's double faces crossed my mind at the time.
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
8/8/2004 3:30:44 AM
The GR1 was and still is a great camera, but I gave mine to a friend. I wasn't using it -- its 28mm lens is sweet, but not as good as the Biogon for my Contax G2.
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
8/6/2004 5:06:31 PM
And here's a mature Cleeo landscape, sans horizon, with muted color, little drama, and the play of incidentals -- those sticklike trees scattered in the falls. Good to compare this with the pretty postcard posted a few days ago, but taken in an earlier year. This is far more complex, more deeply felt and more convincingly shown.
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| Photo By: Cleeo Wright
(K:565)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
8/5/2004 10:57:56 AM
A fine postcard photo. Because I've seen your far more sophisticated (and more recent) horizonless scenics, I have to smile at this one. It's a beautiful rendition of the scenery, but shows nothing that wasn't already there. (Anyone who think that's an odd criticism hasn't seen your later work.)
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| Photo By: Cleeo Wright
(K:565)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
8/5/2004 10:52:42 AM
Well I remember these old Rodeo photos, though I don't believe I saw this particular one. It's a fine piece of work in its genre, apart from the face in shadow -- not much to be done about that, in bright light from a distance.
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| Photo By: Cleeo Wright
(K:565)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
8/4/2004 2:18:58 AM
Thanks to all. Surely nobody could've missed this elegant shadow play. All I did was snap a photo.
For non-New-Yorkers, St. John the Divine is sort of NYC's community church -- for example, they had the big 9/11 memorial there. It's funky and friendly and has chapels devoted to city firemen, to poets, to AIDS, to the environment. Every year on the Feast of St Francis they have a blessing of the animals -- you can bring your pet, and there's always an elephant or a horse or a camel, lots of snakes and chickens etc. Maybe I'll drop in with a camera this fall, though I'm afraid the subject's been done to death.
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
8/4/2004 2:12:46 AM
Thanks. It was those oddly out-of-place panels that caught my eye. They work with the stripes on the floor in counterpoint to the filigree and fretwork elsewhere. The armed angel was irresistible.
I sure do like that 21mm Biogon.
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
8/1/2004 3:19:45 PM
Thanks, folks. FWIW, though it's not easy to see in this little image, there's a lady with a baby carriage at about two o'clock.
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
7/29/2004 10:39:53 AM
Again thanks. I was hoping for the feeling Fabio describes. Notice that this is Neopan 1600, and despite the Photoshop treatment the grain's not very prominent. It's good film.
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
7/29/2004 10:36:50 AM
Many thanks to all. This is a very small part of a larger photo, which is why you see so much grain. Neopan 1600's not really terribly grainy.
Incidentally, it turned out to be a good thing I had only ISO 1600 film with me, since anything rated below that had to go through an X-ray scanner, and I don't trust those things with film.
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
7/20/2004 1:37:43 AM
Your macros are exquisite.
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| Photo By: Ronnie Gaubert
(K:3700)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
7/18/2004 4:25:02 PM
They won't hold still. Anyway, the creepiness I wanted lies in the similarity between real babies and this ersatz.
:-)
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
7/13/2004 2:14:24 PM
Christian: I don't disagree about the posterized background; at first I simply desaturated it. Both ways looked OK to me, so I kept this one. But I take your point.
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
6/22/2004 2:54:00 AM
Igor,
Thanks, but sometimes visibly stylized images are just what I want. Without some schematization this would've been banal, I think.
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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Critique By:
Leslie Hancock (K:910)
6/22/2004 2:48:42 AM
Properly sharpened version at http://www.quinbus.net/gallery/04_June/597_24.
:-)
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| Photo By: Leslie Hancock
(K:910)
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