34 - yellow rectangle

DoctorIt

or should I call it floating notecard? (no PS beyond RAW conversion)



i reckon this is my favorite of my three so far. fits the challenge for sure, but maybe some technical points are missing.. whaddya think?

rahmonster

I like it alot. If it were me, I would make the card a little more yellow and the back ground a little more white, but that's just me.

Sandy

I like it, try to add more contrast around the right edge.

tmlphoto

Erik it cetainly is minimalistic, but not too evocative. I'm having the same problem. How to make find a minimalist shot that has enough present to elicit some kind of emotional response. I looked over your POTD gallery. Looks like your having a good time with the 10D. I'm glad it found a good home .

fish

it's okay if ya like canary pee yeller rectangles.

Lucky Hack

I like it because it's confident, mind you I don't think you'd win the popular vote in this forum, but it's confident and that counts for alot more than you'd think.
keep 'em commin' doc

hoping this message finds you well -Ian

ps. you didn't go art school by any chance?

landrum

I'm sorry, but I'm really not getting much from this one. Your light source seems a bit hot, blowing out the top right corner (though you probably needed it to create the drop shadow). It is definately minimal, though!

adrian_k

what can I add?
nice concept.
more (yellow) colour & landrum's right about your light source

landrum wrote:

I'm sorry, but I'm really not getting much from this one. Your light source seems a bit hot, blowing out the top right corner (though you probably needed it to create the drop shadow). It is definately minimal, though!

DoctorIt

fish wrote:

it's okay if ya like canary pee yeller rectangles.

i'll pick on fish cause I know he can take it, but this is the problem! Damn straight that yellow rectangles aren't exactly exciting, but this isn't emotions anymore, it's minimalism!?!

So landrum noticed the hot corner. Yeah, I thought about that, but if the light was all flat, it would be even more "boring", it added an interesting, minimal but strong diagonal to the photo. If I had two flashes I may have been able to control this better.

Wow. This is really frustrating. There's minimal, and popular-dgrin-minimal...

DoctorIt

landrum wrote:

I'm sorry, but I'm really not getting much from this one.

don't be sorry, you're not supposed to feel minimal art. that was the idea.

ginger_55

ERik, I agree with all you say. This stuff is not exactly supposed to be heartbreaking. As I have said, the winner should be just a white empty triangle.

Other than that, I would like your entry choice if you could just relight it. All it would cost you is time. All of the minimalism I have seen that is a square of yellow or whatever color is that color all the way through. Yours is a different shade at one end than the other.

You could do a gazillion different lighting things and pick one that is even. It is just film.

ginger

DoctorIt

ginger_55 wrote:

ERik, I agree with all you say. This stuff is not exactly supposed to be heartbreaking. As I have said, the winner should be just a white empty triangle.

Other than that, I would like your entry choice if you could just relight it. All it would cost you is time. All of the minimalism I have seen that is a square of yellow or whatever color is that color all the way through. Yours is a different shade at one end than the other.

You could do a gazillion different lighting things and pick one that is even. It is just film.

ginger

thanks ginger

I'm borrowing a second flash tonight, so I'll reshoot with some fill.

wxwax

Erik, my take is that simply being minimal isn't enough. Be it the subject, the lighting, the setting or the color, there needs to be something visually intriguing about an image for it to be exciting. I reckon there's nothing intrinsically wrong with shooting a Post It note. The challenge (hey, a pun!) is in making it interesting. What's missing from your shot is that extra dimension that makes us stop and ponder. You've taken the first steps, by raising it and giving it a shadow and depth. It just needs more, that's all.

DoctorIt

wxwax wrote:

Erik, my take is that simply being minimal isn't enough. Be it the subject, the lighting, the setting or the color, there needs to be something visually intriguing about an image for it to be exciting. I reckon there's nothing intrinsically wrong with shooting a Post It note. The challenge (hey, a pun!) is in making it interesting. What's missing from your shot is that extra dimension that makes us stop and ponder. You've taken the first steps, by raising it and giving it a shadow and depth. It just needs more, that's all.

Yeah.


Hmmm.... yeah. But here's the thing, my silhouette had more, I thought too much, and now there's like 5 silhouettes in the challenge. I think I'm starting to sound whiny, but it's just frustration. I may throw in the towel on this one and just go out with my new big gun and shoot birds.

wxwax

DoctorIt wrote:

Yeah.


Hmmm.... yeah. But here's the thing, my silhouette had more, I thought too much, and now there's like 5 silhouettes in the challenge. I think I'm starting to sound whiny, but it's just frustration. I may throw in the towel on this one and just go out with my new big gun and shoot birds.

BTW, I didn't mean more silhouette, I meant more production value 'magic.' You know... the art thing.

Charlie Brown

perhaps a couple of stacks of post it! notes? like a red, blue, yellow, green stacked up kind of thing. perhaps you can have them fanning out? i dont know, i like your shot but like the waxinator said it needs a bit more. hey i dont like my shot that much, but ill probably enter it because it beats the rest of my shots. i think weve both got ideas floating arround in the haze of our brains, i just dont have the technical skill tht you do to pull it off.



charlie

ginger_55

I don't think we are all going to have magic. I thought the idea was to do the best we each could, until we are satisfied. There are so many entries now, well, if I were only entering to win, I wouldn't bother.

I agree re the magic, I first mentioned hook. Then I thought I would be lucky if I just had an entry, a blank wall. I think this subject is one of the most difficult in which to find a hook, or magic.

However, I do think that one could find Erik's entry on a museum wall displayed as minimalism, along with other photos, of course.

ginger

DoctorIt

reshoot
I don't want to start another new thread, so I'll just put it up here (hopefully people will come back to look)...

I borrowed a second flash last night and set this up so that there was also a lamp casting a faint shadow to one diagonal, and the slave flash gave me a strong shadow in the opposite. I then played with flash ratios until I got enough fill vs shadow. I came up with this:



Boy is that ever boring! So I decided to go down the more abstract road and I started to play around in PS. I was really hoping NOT to do this as you could essentially just create a minimal image starting from nothing in PS, so I just used levels and curves, and I got this:



This I thought was kinda neat, and basically an accident that happened when I autoleveled after a set of curves. Why I like it: well, everyone didn't like the non-uniform background. Although I tried to fix that with fill, what I actually got was much better here, a beautiful diagonal gradient from blue to red.

So take a look and i'm mainly looking for what you like better: more realistic or abstract (first try or second try notecard... not post-it )?

lynnma

DoctorIt wrote:

I don't want to start another new thread, so I'll just put it up here (hopefully people will come back to look)...

I borrowed a second flash last night and set this up so that there was also a lamp casting a faint shadow to one diagonal, and the slave flash gave me a strong shadow in the opposite. I then played with flash ratios until I got enough fill vs shadow. I came up with this:



Boy is that ever boring! So I decided to go down the more abstract road and I started to play around in PS. I was really hoping NOT to do this as you could essentially just create a minimal image starting from nothing in PS, so I just used levels and curves, and I got this:



This I thought was kinda neat, and basically an accident that happened when I autoleveled after a set of curves. Why I like it: well, everyone didn't like the non-uniform background. Although I tried to fix that with fill, what I actually got was much better here, a beautiful diagonal gradient from blue to red.

So take a look and i'm mainly looking for what you like better: more realistic or abstract (first try or second try notecard... not post-it )?

Erik.. I like this last one you've done.. the accidental one. It confuses me a bit (don't take much) like I focus on the yellow, then shift to the red, etc.. I like the way the focus changes from real sharp to fade to fade more, I also like the slight distortion of the red behind the sharp angles of the yellow..
I like it..:D

DoctorIt

lynnma wrote:

Erik.. I like this last one you've done.. the accidental one. It confuses me a bit (don't take much) like I focus on the yellow, then shift to the red, etc.. I like the way the focus changes from real sharp to fade to fade more, I also like the slight distortion of the red behind the sharp angles of the yellow..
I like it..:D

the red and blue are both shadows, hence the distortion, of the "floating" yellow notecard. Thanks Lynn, I'm leaning towards this one too. Minimal, yet confusing and abstract.

digital faerie

lynnma wrote:

Erik.. I like this last one you've done.. the accidental one. It confuses me a bit (don't take much) like I focus on the yellow, then shift to the red, etc.. I like the way the focus changes from real sharp to fade to fade more, I also like the slight distortion of the red behind the sharp angles of the yellow..
I like it..:D

I like this one better.....but there's only one thing that bothers me. the blue shadow is more "reflective" of the yellow shape, while the red is skewed.....if they were both skewed, or if they were both "geometrically replicative" then I'd think it would be stronger.

but then again, that's just me.

DoctorIt

digital faerie wrote:

I like this one better.....but there's only one thing that bothers me. the blue shadow is more "reflective" of the yellow shape, while the red is skewed.....if they were both skewed, or if they were both "geometrically replicative" then I'd think it would be stronger.

but then again, that's just me.

i messed with both my light sources for a long time. it wasn't happening. and after my precise photo earlier was kinda shot down, i figured half skewed and half not was more up the abstract alley.

where's that smiley again... a ha: :deadhorse

wxwax

I kinda like the last one, Erik, with the yellow, red and blue. I like the feeling that the cards are floating.

landrum

I like the last one. The red shadow being skewed did bother me at first, but after looking at it a while I think it's okay. I like how the blue shadow is blurred the most, giving distance.

4labs

glad you didn't end up scrapping the challenge I like the last one..

DoctorIt

this post is more for me, but in case anyone comes back to this old thing, I've made one last adjustment. I didn't like the noise, so I downloaded the neat image plugin demo. this is just on the default settings, and definitely an improvement. if I have time, i'll try to optimize.

original:


after Neat Image:

Charlie Brown

i like this last cleaned up image more than the others. i think youre on the right track.

wxwax

Yeah, I see the difference and it looks good, dr.

Shakey

better clean

Tim

Jenny

You've got my vote! This is great! I am so frustrated with this challenge...2 days to go and I still have nothing but a bunch of shots I hate. :splat This is the most interesting use of minimalism I've seen so far. Great job!

Mitchell

The last one gets my vote. That really cleaned up nicely.


mitch