Saturday, August 22, 2009

Bad photo and why it's bad . . .

Sometimes I get so carried away that I forget to think. For instance, thinking about shallow depth of field and how I like the way water droplets look in the background, all out of focus and sparkly, made me think of something else. Some of you in my class alumni group may recall the cool holographic paper that I found a couple of years ago and sent out to those of you who requested it. Remember how it created pretty multicolored sparkles in the background? Well, I figured why not use it with the dandelion puff to put sparkles behind it?

Big mistake. But why? The reason why is because I became enamored of the EFFECT rather than the overall photograph. I figured, "Cool sparkly stuff behind dandelion puff" without really thinking about why I was photographing the dandelion puff to begin with.

To make things worse, I tried to tone down the sparkles, and so I put RED sparkly netting in FRONT of the holographic paper. Sheesh. What the heck am I thinking? Here's the result. A weird photograph of a dandelion seed hanging from a dandelion puff.

And you can see that this dandelion seed is getting tired. It's "hairs" are beginning to bend in strange directions, it's about to fall off the "mother ship," and it's not really sharp. (Actually, one could say the same thing about ME, but I digress . . .)

We have to make a lot of mistakes along the way. And this is one. Of many. And it won't be the last. At least I KNOW it's a mistake! Wish I'd known it an hour or so ago . . . ©Carol Leigh

5 comments:

marianne said...

There's a little too much color cast on the dandelion and seed for my taste but I actually don't mind the color effect in the background. What bugs me more is that the image looks upside down to me. I like it better 180 but then the seed is too close to the edge.

Hmmmm...this sounds a little like the feather positioning remark :-)

gottago said...

giggle:-)

Diane Miller said...

It just looks a little off to me, but not a disaster. The BG is not that bad -- just different. The tired seed is OK -- I can relate to tired most days. The mother ship looks a little more like a cat's cheek than a dandelion head, but that's OK too!

Carol Leigh said...

You're too kind . . . And duh, if I'd been thinking when I asked where we could see your work, I would have known to just click on your name, which would take us to your site at http://www.dianedmiller.com/ . . . and anyone who's a friend of Alan Glazier is a friend of mine! --
Carol Leigh

Diane Miller said...

Cool! Alan and Janet are great folks. We belong to the same photo club and it always fun to find myself on the occasional bushwhacking expedition with them. His photography is wonderful!