Originally Posted by
Daniel Casper Lohenstein
Well, I think the New Jersey Farm is quite interesting. It makes me think of some pictures of Andrew Wyeth. But that's a first impression. Perhaps it is the loneliness of the farm. Perhaps one could elaborate this loneliness by changing the camera position, because the picture seems to be accessible from the viewers position and this seems to reduce the loneliness. But you said: the ground provides a basis to ground the sky, so perhaps the loneliness of the farm is not important at all. So, why do you show the farm, even in the name of the picture?
The problem is: seeing this picture on the screen of my notebook is not satisfying. I presume that you enlarged it. It has a wide angle character (distant things are far away whereas empty planes are dominating), so it requires an enlargement of 1.5 - 2 meters. Then you will have more texture in the corn, and texture inhibits immersion, by building a barrier that prevents accessability. The farm will appear more isolated, creating a distant relation from the corn here to the farm over there. The spectator will look from below (from the horizon line), so the sky above him will definitely be very impressive, as you percepted it when taking the photograph.
It's neither a dramatic nor an epic picture but a lyrical picture, with a strong subject, the lyrical "Me" here and a described "there", perhaps this is the reason why I think of Wyeth. In Wyeths "Christina's World" the grass is shown to be touched by Christina's hands, moving forward, endlessly, towards the farm.
I think that in this picture the task or challenge is not balancing or disposing or composing but enlargement and the mounting on the wall.
But if you mount it too high, to get a conicidence of eye level and horizon line, the picture could lack foreground. Perhaps a greater wide angle lens could help, positioning the horizon line a little bit in direction of the vertical center of the image, creating more foreground to elaborate the position of the viewing spectator. What about using a vertical format, exaggerating the verticality by using a 2:3 ratio (the 6x7 format seems to be tempered)?
Another possibiliy: perhaps you tought at the american expressionism à la Rothko, disposing a huge sky as a picure parallel area / surface in relation to another area below it with more and different texture and color compared to the cloudy sky. Then Andreas Feininger could be your friend. He isolated builings by photographing them with extreme tele lenses. You could keep the ratio between sky and landscape, but eliminate the foreground, reducing the picture to the relation of earth to sky and human existence in this world. Enlargement could be - perhaps - 60 x 70 cm? Fortunately the format of the RB67 "allows" cropping ...
But this is a question of enlargement, too. The farm is far away, producing an impression to be long-sighted, e.g. like a building in a tuscan fresco. But the wide angle produces an impression to be short-sighted, tilting the ground of the picture space to the spectator, e.g. like the interior of a early netherlandish painting.
Viele Grüsse
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