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| Photography / Urban & Rural / Cityscapes & Skylines | ©2011-2013 *toko |
-- Blurred on purpose of course! Print is also available in original size and ratio.
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Deviousness `anmari has been spreading her infectious positivity throughout our community for over 6 years. Throughout this time Ana has been at the core of all things devious, passionately developing an eclectic gallery, helping organise devmeets, participating in chat events and also recently completed dedicating her time as a Community Volunteer. We are absolutely delighted to bestow the Deviousness Award for May 2013 to `anmari, congratulations! Read More
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Sta.sh
Having said that, in order to get through the technical part as quickly as possible, the colours are pretty good. As a personal preference and nothing more, I would have liked to see the blacks pumped up a bit, but this is my conventional thinking in the way. As long as the concept is the abstraction, it might work better this way.
Now to the more important stuff. I'll tell you my reaction when first seeing the picture. My eyes tried to focus for a split second, they failed, the brain took over and thought that this is due to the jpg loading slowly for another split second and then my eye fell on the word bokeh, which took me another second to process and end up thinking the semantics of the title, where the problem is that a bokeh is a property of a lens and not of a skyline. Nevertheless, I got what you were talking about.
I do understand what you were trying to do with this, but a first reaction is that I can only see this being used as a very decent background to something. You'd also have to have a very impressive frame to make a print of this look like something that went through a coherent thought process. A lens blur is a lot more effective than a Gaussian blur post-processing effect and the bokeh allows for the city lights to look completely round (since you obviously used your lens' maximum aperture) and less dull. Nevertheless, I fail to see this as an abstraction and I'd rather see the dark silhouette of the city or something similar. Another idea in order to produce a similar result, at least in my eyes and my completely subjective view, would have been if you had a very small, unimportant object in focus in the foreground (like an insect, which I understand that it's very difficult to capture or of a parachute seed, both of which can be achieved by sticking things on a glass surface that you hold in front of the lens) and 99% of the rest of the picture would be the well framed out-of-focus cityscape.
Two things for which I consider you deserve a lot of credit is the sheer BRAVE ORIGINALITY of this work and the fact that it has an obvious impact on other photographers like myself to start thinking out of the box.
However I think it works amazingly well here. As you said yourself, you chose to shoot an extremely classic picture of NY. Almost everyone has already seen pictures took from this angle. Your colors would have still given it something more because the shades of various blues and reds work extremely well here, but still I agree it would have been one picture in dozens.
What happens there is that by giving away a pretension to sharpness, you uproot your picture and instead of shooting a picture of New York, the subject of your photo becomes the silhouette of the city, the brilliance of lights and the movements you can guess on the roads. You don't shoot a place anymore, you shoot a concept.
I love how well balanced the values are, how nicely pale is the sky without being too clear, how interestingly the setting sun (or is it rising?) answers to the red hue of the car lights. I also love the contrast between the black silhouette of the skyline, so weird and unsettling, and the peaceful perfect blue of the sea.
Most of all, I love how the lights are made bigger by the bokeh and bring the viewer's attention to the life of the city.
This pic is a dreamer's pic. It's the view of someone who's standing before a huge city and stares so far away that everything else becomes blurred - and it's okay, details don't matter, it's only the dream that counts. In fact, what you achieved here is something quite incredible: you didn't shoot "a" city. You shot "the" city, abstract, luminous, fascinating - beautiful. Hats off.
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