Bronica EC-TL, 50mm Zenzanon
Bronica EC-TL, 50mm Zenzanon
I agree. Tuco, have you thought about staging a model to personify your meaning? In this context almost any human in the foreground would add dramatic impact. Your kids, any bystander would do. You're definitely on the right track, I'm just wondering how to make it a more emphatic statement. Looking forward to more.
Now, I just need to argue with this
Any human in the frame would not necessary make a better, more dramatic, or mor empathic statement. It might or it might not, but it would certainly make it into another picture, with a whole different angle and story told.
Any human (or humans) in a frame almost automatically becomes the subject. The subject that we as viewers relate to and try to explain, build a story around.
That's what we do as humans, interpreting other humans.
But if you want to make the actual street, building or landscape the subject, making it the thing that owns the story that is being told in picture, leaving out humans makes it so much easier.
For examples, compositions balancing geometrical patterns or areas of shadows and highlight, especially bordering on abstraction, usually don't benefit from from the inclusion of humans.
I have no idea of tuco's intent.
But I personally thought a bit about it, always being reluctant to put people in my own landscape pictures.
Not saying it's better, or easier. But it's different. And putting a human in the frame is not always the best way to reach your goal.
It depends on what you're trying to achieve.
/Lasse
Lasse: We agree that adding a person to a landscape image rarely works. However, Tuco's subject (post #5589) is not a landscape and could have social-political interpretations. A human form under the surveillance camera might be interesting. Of course, it would require different composition and a pose that made the human rather anonymous.
Yes, it could defiantly make it more interesting, even make make it better, but it would also make it very different.
You could say that, as the image stands, the surveillance camera could be seen as the subject, with its eye watching us that are looking at the image. We and the camera are in a sense antagonists. The threat is more directed towards us as in, "If I would be standing there I would be watched".
Put a person in the image and then he or she becomes the subject with the surveillance camera watching at her or him. The person in the image and the surveillance camera are then antagonists. And we have more become onlookers as in "Look, somebody is watching him or her".
Personally I'm more drawn to the first, which I think has the best potentional for emotional impact if well executed. But I'm likewise sure the compelling arguments can easily be made for the opposite view.
/Lasse
Pay phones! And intact. How quaint. This must be an historical district, with period appointments.
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