10 Comments

1. Whatisee | January 28, 2005 10:46 PM

   Love the Eye

2. leova | January 29, 2005 1:30 AM

   it's all about EYE!!! GREAT! PERFECT!!!

3. Andy (SensorChip) | January 29, 2005 5:18 AM

   Perfect, this really is great.

4. djn1 | January 29, 2005 5:38 AM

   I agree, the eye is great, It's also good that you can't see her mouth and hence can't gauge her expression. The only slight distraction is (what I presume is) her right arm in that the red piping on her sleeve pulls my attention to that area of the frame. I think I might have been tempted to cheat a bit with this one and either colour the piping the same as the rest of her sleeve or just tone it down a bit.

5. Matthias | January 29, 2005 8:30 AM

   Wow, I like your works. Great site.

6. Travis | January 29, 2005 9:50 AM

   Excellant observation about the sleeve. I do very little detail image corrrections, but in this case I can see where it might have really helped. I'm pretty new at doing these small corrections and have been somewhat hesitant to go there. I think I need to get over that. I've been a long time darkroom printer and have been applying that standard to processing digital files. In other words if I couldn't do in a darkroom I was not doing on the computer. I'm starting to see where I should move beyond that standard. Only slightly. I'm very concerned with a truthful journalistic standard that I very much want to adhere too. This is a case where I could have taken the processing one step further. Thanks.

7. djn1 | January 29, 2005 10:51 AM

   I think there are two things here. First: I think you could have made this change in a darkroom by masking that area and dialling in a different set of filter values, but it would have been very time consuming and difficult to achieve convincingly. Photoshop makes such changes exponentially easier. And maybe this is a factor, maybe it seems too easy.

   Second: the artistic worth of this shot is (partially) compromised by the 'truthful journalistic standard' you've applied - it draws attention away from your point of focus. Furthermore, and this is admittedly a bit post hoc, I suspect that you may well have altered your angle of view prior to taking the shot if you'd noticed quite how bright her sleeve appeared in the frame.

   In other words, I think the aesthetic gains in desaturating or otherwise changing her sleeve outweigh, in this instance, any losses with respect to journalistic integrity.

8. Philip Newton | January 29, 2005 4:54 PM

   I suppose you can debate red stipes and pick the picture apart by it's details but if your color blind or otherwise challenged all you see is the mystery of what shes feeling, the desire to share the intamacy that is denied us, hence the pleasure of the voyeur... the itch that cnonot be soothed, the erotic allure of whats cloaked and hidden. We want what we can't have and we project our own desire into all the blanks that are left empty around her eye.

9. Lynn Marie | February 4, 2005 6:30 PM

   I understand the debate on the sleeve, but that red stripe is an important part of the photo for me. As soon as that vibrant stripe leads my eye out, it leads it right back into the eye (pun totally intended) of the image. The strip also drew my attention to the larger compositional elements of the photo--the way the straphangers lead into a parting of the sea to reveal this perfect eye, the way the photo is divided into a very painterly series of triangles. We are perfectly set up by these compositional choices to see through the larger world of the impersonal into the internal world of the absolutely personal.

10. Todd | February 28, 2005 5:42 PM

    I didn't notice the sleeve until it was pointed out. I wouldn't change a thing.