River Loire

These are photos I took of the river recently. Considering it is a major river in France, the water level is incredibly low, which is what I was trying to show when taking these photos. It may well be that the sandbanks would have been more impressive if I had taken them from a bridge!

One or two are in my gallery, but I would very much appreciate some critique as when a photo does not get any comments (good or bad), it clearly doesn't make much impression!!!
It may be that they are just plain boring - I would not be in the slightest bit offended if that is the case!!

Are they over-saturated? Is the composition boring or just not there?

Barge



Boats



Wall



Loire sandbanks

Dont mind the first two but there is not a lot in the others to catch the interest.

You state your intention as trying to show the low state of the river; I reckon you have succeeded in this. They are good record shots to bring out in years to come perhaps.

As photographs I feel they are a little lacking in impact. The landscape looks very flat which is not a good start, but with a bit of poking around you might have found some foreground interest to add a little sustance. For example in "Boats" the foremost dinghy has interesting peeling paint. There a narrow creek in the last one which would provide a nice lead-in. There are clumps of reeds and grasses, some dried cracked mud, perhaps. Etc.

The light is also very flat, as if the pictures were taken at midday. Longer sharper shadows eary of late in the day would apply a little modelling to the landscape.

It may of course just be one of those lovely places which are nice to see and walk about in but don't naturally lend themselves to two dimensional capture. The Somerset Levels are a bit like that: I never feel I do the area justice.

My reply disappeared .... !
Anyway, many thanks for your comments - and you confirm the conclusion I had reached : they are boring !!!

Wide flat landscapes need a strong point of interest. Perhaps I try to get too much in the photo rather than concentrating on one thing.

I've cropped the boat photo and I think that's already an improvement :




Interestingly, in cropping more closely; I can see a couple of wayward dust specks

I agree with Andrew's comments.

I find if you have lack of a strong focal point with wide landscapes then you can create one by getting low to the ground. Something mundane can suddenly anchor a picture, be it a clump of grass, pebble or stick.

I also think the boat picture looks better cropped.

Regards

George

Ooops, deleted N. 4 from Flickr

Loire sandbanks

An extraordinary view of the Loire. Lake Vassiviere near us is 5 metres below normal. The nuclear power station near Starless has nicked all the water from the Vienne. Laughingly I heard on the radio last week that they have finally announced water restictions in the Haute Vienne, I can from the start of November no longer fill up my swimming pool nor water my garden. Photo wise, river mud ain't great. I'd wait until it fills up again, find a bit of foreground interest and get there before dawn.

I think the photos succeed in showing the current state of the river. To me this is reportage rather than landscape photography, so you could include more elements that help tell the story - e.g. get the boats into the foreground, include human interest, etc.

That said, I quite like the last shot as a regular 'landscape shot'.

The problem with that first picture is that there's just way too much interesting detail.

Clone it out like in this one, and it could be worth millions...

Gursky is one of my favourites. There's certainly no cloning involved in creating his epic minimalistic images, he does it the hard way - fastidiously selecting his viewpoint. Without disrespect to Blaze, Gursky's images are in another dimension to these.

In that article, it says

[quote="BBC"]"In the end I decided to digitalise the pictures and leave out the elements that bothered me," he added.[/quote]I interpreted that to mean he'd been cloning.

Edit: Tate article...

[quote="link above"]Gursky digitally erased buildings on the far side of the river from his picture. This manipulation enhances the image visually, giving it more formal coherence. Rather than the sense of a specific place, the picture conveys an almost Platonic ideal of a body of water traversing as landscape. Gursky talks about this image in terms of its contemporaneity, saying, ‘I wasn’t interested in an unusual, possibly picturesque view of the Rhine, but in the most contemporary possible view of it. Paradoxically, this view of the Rhine cannot be obtained in situ; a fictitious construction was required to provide an accurate image of a modern river’ (quoted in ‘... I generally let things develop slowly’, Andreas Gursky: Fotografien 1994-1998, p.ix).
[/quote]The case for the defence rests, m'lud

Well, I thought there was a little too much detail ......... but .....
That certainly gives food for thought. I shall look at Gursky's photos more closely - many thanks for the steer, Chris

Well OK I didn't know that - I assumed that because most of Gursky's work is film based, he wouldn't use cloning!

But anyway, it's clear that 'his vision' was this simplified view of that industrialised, straightened river and he edited out some minor elements, which is perhaps slightly different from starting with a rustic scene like the one above and completely changing its character.

Well I prefer yours, to be honest

Gursky's one is interesting, in a geometrical sense, I suppose, but it doesn't do much for me.

It would have been clever if it had been a real view, without needing the cloning, but for it to be worth nearly three million quid is madness.

It smacks of a pretentiousness, even an 'emperor's new clothes' thing, to me, but I'm a bit of a philistine when it comes to art.

Well yes, I'd agree

My initial post was intended as a bit tongue-in-cheek, really.