Steve,
I do not find your photo boring. My eye is attracted to the Gas Pump as a first focal point. However, it offends the whole photo by appearing (on my screen) to be not sharply in focus. To my thinking, the eye expects the "key" to be in focus. If this is only a result of the on-line presentation, please excuse.
OK - I'll hazard a guess that it's about the sky. To me it looks like maybe the white cloud on the lower right section of sky didn't get the same post-filtering the rest of the sky did. To me it seems like the rest of the sky is lower contrast than it could be, by the way.
Chris
-------------------------
Linhof Technika III-5
Mamiya RB67
I don't fint the picture boring (mainly because I've taken a few like this myself). I like the glow of the pump, the textures in the building and the pattern in the sky. To the right of the center pole may need a bit of dodging but other than that and possibly enhancing the lettering on the board, it looks fine to me.
I am, however, genuinely interested in pursuing the idea of boring...
In all sincerity, could those of you who find this photo boring, banal or pedestrian PLEASE show us one of yours (best idea!) or a link to an old building in a similar setting that you consider NOT boring? I am being sincere. I think we can all learn something from this. I do concede that it is hard to be original or more than just documentarian in many of these canonical photographs of rot ruin rust rubbish ...
Please show us
When I was 16 I thought my father the stupidest man in the world; when I reached 21, I was astounded by how much he had learned in just 5 years!
-appropriated from Mark Twain
I generally like the picture, but would like it more if the dark void under the porch had more visible detail in it. If I had taken that shot I would have seriously considered adding some fill flash to accentuate that part of the image.
I find my eye travels left to right, and right off the image -- with no good reason to return to it. If not boring, it is as least not interesting -- which for me has nothing to do with the subject matter, but instead, all to do with the image.
With effort, I can come back to the petrol pump, but it is not sufficient to hold my eye on its own.
The quality of light is lacking, but that just may be the digital reproduction I am seeing.
To give a responce to Richard K, is the subject the pump, the table, the door, the sign, or the sky.
Whichever, I would be inclined to simplify and eliminate unbalanced items.
The heavy dark sky and the light pump and table reverse the stablitiy of the image.
The table leads the eye right out of the image.
I think there are 3 or 4 pictures in this picture, but which is the purpose of the op remains to be known.
As a test neg, it has white,black and tones in between. I dont know what the technical deficiency is. It is not really amenable to test strips.
Hmmm, I think the picture makes me think about how this building has had many different purposes over the years. It's all about the letters on the wall.
If this photograph was to be part of a portfolio of similar buildings with letters on the wall I think people would start to reflect much more about how we move with time.
We would not think of each photograph as boring...the context would make all photographs meaningful
Forgive me for I have sinned -- but I had a good time doing it!
Vaughn is on the right track - the focal point of the image is the gas pump, so why not feature it more prominently? The right-hand side of the image was uninteresting, so loose it.
Regarding the sky, I would have framed the image such that no sky was visible. What does it add to the image? In this case, nothing; it certainly doesn't have enough going on to really warrant having it in the image.
Just my humble $0.02 worth of opinion
Well, messing around with the composition of others must be a sin, so we all know where I'll be on May 21st -- squarely on the ground with my feet of clay.
I will disagree with Patrik -- a good documentary image should hold up both as a document (the "context") and as an image...and that holds for all images of a series. If one image is not as strong as the others, then one has a weak image in the series...and that image should be re-worked, re-made, or tossed out.
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