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Night-time in America's small towns

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11–20 of 66 posts

Re: Night-time in America's small towns

#11
post #4

Regardless of your opinion on the subject matter, I can unreservedly recommend this piece as a sublime example of the photographer's art.

I disagree, the poor quality and bad HDR really detracted from the images for me, they were painful to look at.

I hate bad HDR as much as the next guy, but I don't think these fell into that bucket. Just long exposures and some additional lighting.

Re: Night-time in America's small towns

#13
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally honest question here: can you be very specific about what caused these photos to be painful for you to look at? I have no formal photographic training but I have always taken a lot of pictures, and I've been told that some of them are good. I do know what HDR is, gleaned from various hacker news posts over the years. What is painful about these photos, to you?

It's funny, now it's called HDR (for high dynamic range) but really you are compressing the "dynamic range" to make details visible that otherwise would be washed out or too dark. This has been a regular part of photography from the darkroom days, manipulating the exposure time, masking parts to selectively reduce exposure, "burning in" other parts. Especially with BW photography. The sort of other-worldly crispness,…

The "high dynamic range" refers to the input range, not the output range, so it isn't a misnomer as you suggest.

This also what separates it a bit from techniques like masking which don't change the underlying range available, but rather tweaking the exposure in an area. Dodging and burning are dark room techniques, which is a whole different kettle of fish.

As you note though, people used to do similar things with exposure bracketing in analog days - it's just a lot easier with digital.

Fundamentally you can get some pretty similar results with selective lighting. After all you are locally changing the effective represented photon density hitting your receptor, either way.

Re: Night-time in America's small towns

#14
Having grown up in a country where nationalism kind of harks back to nazism, it's always weird for me to see all the flags everywhere. It's just not something I can get used to, even after all these years of seeing US flags everywhere.

Re: Night-time in America's small towns

#15
I live in a place like those. Its great photography, but the mundane subjects make it hard to get into.

Trying to locate any of those, I settled on one with an unusual street sign - 'Coolbaugh St'. There are 2 in the US, both in Pennsylvania. Neither has that building along it! Strange

Re: Night-time in America's small towns

#16
post #4

Regardless of your opinion on the subject matter, I can unreservedly recommend this piece as a sublime example of the photographer's art.

I disagree, the poor quality and bad HDR really detracted from the images for me, they were painful to look at.

Love it that people downvote you for expressing your opinion. I agree that the choice for lighting and retouching absolutely detract from these images. If anything, they perfectly illustrate a serious problem happening in American discourse: taking the raw document that is small town America and then filtering it to fit whatever viewpoint you want to project. Dems used to project the veneer of unions, Reps promise jobs, neither truly cares to go below the surface.

Also road trip photography journeys a la Stephen Shore and Timothy O'Sullivan are so overdone. It's like the liberal arts student rite of passage these days.

Re: Night-time in America's small towns

#17
post #14

Having grown up in a country where nationalism kind of harks back to nazism, it's always weird for me to see all the flags everywhere. It's just not something I can get used to, even after all these years of seeing US flags everywhere.

Having grown up in small town America, it's becoming weird for me to see these flags, too.

They don't feel the same as they did when I was a kid, and there are more of them, and they're used in different contexts.

Re: Night-time in America's small towns

#18
post #12

Fantastic images. I wish each photo included the city and state where it was taken for context.

Looks like Tonopah, Nevada for at least two of them:

The garage photo: https://goo.gl/maps/kDAs2buEaaL2

The car sticking out of the earth:

https://goo.gl/maps/JuFdKETPtgw

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/international-car-forest-...

Two more appear to be in Red Oak, Iowa. I googled for "red oak printing" that is visible in one of the photos, which led to coolbaugh lane on the map, which is also visible in another photo.

https://goo.gl/maps/b8vnAwEndWz

Re: Night-time in America's small towns

#19
post #14

Having grown up in a country where nationalism kind of harks back to nazism, it's always weird for me to see all the flags everywhere. It's just not something I can get used to, even after all these years of seeing US flags everywhere.

[deleted]

Re: Night-time in America's small towns

#20
post #4

Regardless of your opinion on the subject matter, I can unreservedly recommend this piece as a sublime example of the photographer's art.

I disagree, the poor quality and bad HDR really detracted from the images for me, they were painful to look at.

HDR? Do you mean fill flash?
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