Asher Kelman
OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I must admit, Cem, that I didn't see this picture. I was careful to respond to your scans of the photographs of the tree branches, but I just missed this one, and it's so much better! Well better late than never!Hi David,
Thanks a lot for the tip, I'll look into it. I went to Antwerpen this afternoon to the Calumet store but alas, they had no film any longer. I've then visited another good shop, Grobet, and they had some film rolls which were past their best before dates. So I bought whatever I could find, among others the Fuji Pro 160S. I took some pictures using this film and had it developed at a local store using their 1 hour service. When I came back home, I have given it a try with my Canon FS4000US film scanner, to see how it'd go. Unfortunately, I am disappointed. I cannot get anything but very grainy pictures with a lot of color balance problems, probably due to being past their BB date.
Here is one such example. Canon EOS 3, 70-200mm L IS f2.8, Fuji PRO 160S negative film:
PS: The big red blob down the LHS must be a lens flare, I guess.
Cheers,
(BTW, anyone reading this, look at other recent pictures that await your comments. Imants K, for example, has had only 1 reply from me, and that's not good enough for us!)
Well now I have the picture before me in another window and it's as if I was looking out right now and seeing someone by the water waiting for the sun to go down, for his girlfriend or wife to return (not at the same time) with the wine. Or maybe there's already one of them sitting on the ground in front of the first figure. Either that, or his backpack or his thighs are wide apart.
So for the main subject, there's a lack of clarity. We do need to know he/she is alone or with someone so we can then be facilitated to contemplate all the various myriads of thought the person has.
The picture is, I suggest, not meant to be beautiful, but contemplative, but that's just my interpretation. For this, and the promising diagonals falling down from the left and bringing us to the figure, I'd have preferred to have a wide picture. After all this is set up to be restful. The are no crowds, there's no rain or papers blown by rough wind. There is just one figure, the empty stanchion for a boat to tie its mooring ropes perhaps, but none are in sight.
One cannot marvel at the sky. What is marvelous, however, is the thoughts and solitude of this person. Even if there's one more person there, it's still a very personal time and one likely to be remembered.
One should not always look for or try to achieve beauty. It's very thin and easily tired of. So to say this is not beautiful is not meant to be any negative. Rather we can give attention to the humanity. It's as if, at this alignment of a person with the water and sun and mans shadow, there is a connection with something larger than ourselves.
So this is the value of this kind of picture.
I regret not having noticed it before. I hope that this will be returned to as a subject. It never requires startling painted skies. This is just about right in beauty, but I do think the subject/s need to be better defined. Well, that's my take based on the many assumptions I have made, which may or may not fit your ideas of what was going on.
Thanks for sharing,
Asher