I want to ride my bicycle

[AmstelBright]

You say black, I say white by AmstelBright, on Flickr

 

[grebeman]

Do you know which one is yours?

Barrie

 

[AmstelBright]

Yes, but not in black & white.

I actually don't know whether to like or hate this photo. On the one hand it's just a big mess, on the other there seems to be an intriguing rhythm in it (especially in this deliberately noisy B&W version) that made me decide not to discard the picture after all. Seems like a theme I should pursue further - perhaps starting with less DoF?

 

[grebeman]

Yes, but not in black & white.

I actually don't know whether to like or hate this photo. On the one hand it's just a big mess, on the other there seems to be an intriguing rhythm in it (especially in this deliberately noisy B&W version) that made me decide not to discard the picture after all. Seems like a theme I should pursue further - perhaps starting with less DoF?

Personally I like a large depth of field, but that seems to be regarded as old fashioned by many these days, I doubt if I would have given the photograph as much "study time" if it had had a shallow depth of field. In those terms I find an out of focus foreground particularly hard to take, but perhaps I just don't get it.

Barrie

 

[johncox111]

The DoF and noise gives it a very Pop art feel. You can get tired of Pop art but theres a good market for it especially with photography.

 

[AmstelBright]

Yeah, maybe you're right. I'll definitely do some DoF experiments in the future, but I guess the wide DoF does work better in this case. One thing I do like about this picture is the diagonal lines from the upper left corner, which I see quite clearly when looking through my eyelashes. That provides some order in the chaos. :smile:

 

[mauve]

Well, I love this picture. Don't know why, but "it just works" for me. The 2 diagonals of the aligned saddles and aligned handlebars does the trick, with just enough variations of shapes and position to keep the eye "interested" over the sea of frame tubes.

That's the magic of b&w, to produce interesting images based on juxtaposition of look alike shapes where real life scenes look confuse because of the discrepancies of colors. B&W in those cases works like a tool to reveal fortuitous hidden structures in a seemingly chaotic world.

I think it blends right with the human brain, as I read somewhere that our mind is in fact almost wired to detect such structures out of nowhere (for instance, humanity has always grouped and classified stars in the night sky based on look, trying hard to find order and structure there, long before we had the tools to know how far apart some of those stars really are. We do that for about every pattern we stumble upon.)

Cheers,