Mar 26, 2006

Sunday Morning Fun

Perhaps I felt inspired by my morning cup of coffee, but I decided to try another "sandwiched" image using coffee beans. Originally I attempted to create an image where my husband was sitting peacefully atop the pile, probably getting high on the coffee fumes, but I wasn't happy with how it came out. Maybe something about someone sitting on my coffee makes me uneasy. Anyway, I played around with a few other images and this is what I came up with. I like it.



I submitted it to photoSIG - a website where photographers critique each other's work - and got a critique suggesting that I make the tree less foggy and have more of the beans in focus. I found this critique interesting. I like the foggy effect and the shallow depth of field on the beans. If I were to bring out more of the tree, the coffee beans would become obscured by the background image. I often find (and I'm guilty of this myself) that the critiquers on photoSIG critique an image as if it is meant to be "perfect" and realistic. While striving to create images like this hones one's technical skills, to be sure, a lot of really stellar artistic shots that break the rules very well end up getting poor reviews or hardly any reviews at all. Not saying this image falls into that category, per se. Anyway, these "sandwiched" images I've been doing are meant to have their slight imperfections. I don't want to pick and choose parts of pictures and composite them together to make a shiny, perfect picture. That seems to be a very popular thing to do now, with powerful graphics programs making it fairly easy to do. I admire and appreciate well done composited images, but I'm trying to do something different. Hope I didn't sound to bitter there! I'm just having fun here and I hope you're enjoying these experiments too!

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