Photography Blog | South | Africa

First of all, many thanks to everyone who sent me their conversions of the picture yesterday or this morning. I've gotten about a hundred and fifty as I begin writing this post, so obviously I can't show them all, but, just as obviously, the more the merrier for me. It was fun to see them all, as it was fascinating to read your comments. Thanks very much to one and all.

I'll limit the ones I'll show to a dozen or two—and they won't just be the ones I think are "best." I don't think there's any "this is best" in play here, actually; at no time did I find myself thinking in terms of "best" or "worst." I'm not saying I like everybody's equally (this isn't kindergarten, and I don't) or that you should, but I took the exercise at its face value—people are imposing on the picture how they like to see B&W, or how they like to see this image in B&W. So, okay. We're all essentially talking about our own tastes. Not a contest.

First of all, here's mine:

I'd play it pretty straight; this is definitely informed by my style with film. The key for me is to go up to the cliff's edge but not over it with those tempting clouds. I'd want them to have a nice rich glow in the print but stay gentle.

I should mention, though, that if I were printing an image like this for real—with an inkjet printer or in the darkroom, either one—I would consider this the guide print stage. The next step would be to put the print up on the viewing board for 1–3 days and look at it. Sooner or later, I would know how I felt about it, and then I'd know what I wanted to do with it...whether I wanted to take it further, or dial it back, or change something, or leave it as-is, whatever. Not till that point would I go make the final version.

To me, that interval is a critically important stage of making a fine print. A little time going by does wonders to clarify your mind. Call it eyeball time. The looking is what does the work.

Several readers, like Mark Muse, made conversions that were quite close to mine—maybe differing in detail, but not in overall feel. Walter Glover's was very close to mine but he added a rich sepia color, as he confessed to "a hankering for warm-tone or Chloro-Bromide prints." Others, for instance Mark Steigelman, Carl Root and Jim Bullard, took the same basic vibe but went a little hotter and darker.

Perhaps the closest doppelgänger of mine was sent in by Ricardo Silva Cordeiro, who's a graphic designer by trade. If you look closely—the differences are subtle—you'll notice that he's gone for a little harder sharpness in the land area and a little less in the sky. And note how that choice emphasizes the contrasting corporeality or materiality of the elements in the picture: his tree's a bit more of a solid object and his clouds a little more vaporous. Certainly a defensible choice.

Lynn Burdekin's made me feel like Ricardo and I had gone a little too far and hadn't kept it soft enough. "To me this is a 'Rural Romantic' image," Lynn writes, "so I wanted to bring out a soft, romantic feel—as if I were a painter admiring the scene from an easel, rather than a photographer holding a camera."

Here's one of the several "sepia" treatments—this one is from Steve Lincoln. "This was fun. I used CS5, a B&W adjustment layer with some blue and cyan tweaks, a layer mask to lighten the foreground.... Then I converted to a bronze duo-tone and added a border, which the duo-tone renders in a nice creamy off-white. I often use the bronze duo-tone for this type of landscape—looks great in print."

Steve spotted out the hawk!

One of the first ones to come in, from Animesh Ray, shows a very different approach to tonality, especially in the balance between sky and land. To me it makes it look like much later in the evening. I like the tonality of some of Animesh's film pictures and even featured one on the blog once! But his choice here is much more radical than anything I'd do.

Speaking of tonality, let your eyes go back and forth between Sergey Botvin's restrained, almost plainspoken interpretation and Simon Crofts' more florid "verging-on-IR" take, below:

Those are very different photographs.

Implying no criticism of Simon's choices, I will say I admire Sergey's version. It's got a no-nonsense quality to it, sort of the opposite of some of the most over-the-top versions. Jeff Hohner's was quite close to Sergey's. Neither calls attention to technique, and that can be a plus.

We'll get to some other issues in the next post (Part II), but before I close this one I'll just note that with so many entries, there was naturally a range of the basic tonal choices. Some people made the blacks blacker, some dodged under the tree; some increased the sturm und drang of the clouds and some deemphasized them. I'll leave you with two tonal outliers. Rory O'Toole, in the upper of these last two pictures, has made the clouds light and ethereal, while simultaneously lightening the land and greatly increasing its contrast. Neils Volkmann, in the lower picture, has darkened everything, especially the clouds (although you'll notice he uses less contrast in the field and trees):

We're thoroughly into "technique head" here (i.e., a technical mindset), but see if you can back off from that for a moment and just look at these two pictures in terms of their emotional effect and the overall sense that they'd communicate to you if either were the only version of this picture you'd ever seen. They convey very different "weather reports," and the feeling-tone they convey is greatly divergent as well.

I'm not sure I could support the following convincingly in a debate, but I've heard—and I think I believe—that the best printers tend to be the ones who go beyond "applications of technique" and think mostly about the feel of what they're trying to convey. What sense should this simple picture impart to viewers? Is its fidelity to the actual weather conditions important to you or not? How much is the picture "about" the birds? (They're emphasized in Rory's version, you'll note, and almost unnoticeable in Niels's.) I'm not saying the feel of either of these is wrong or right—they're just artistic choices, that any photographer would be applying to any picture they'd taken themselves. But it runs a considerable gamut, especially in  black-and-white.

In the next post, we'll get into the issue of transforming the picture into something entirely separate from the observable scene. 

Mike

[Note: An early version of this post was lost, and a number of readers responded to my desperate pleas for help by sending me cached copies from their readers so I could reconstruct it. A very big "THANK YOU!" to each and every one of them, especially Carsten Bockermann, whose copy reached me first and was used to reconstruct what you see here.

All I can say is: Whew! —MJ]

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Ricardo Cordeiro: I really like Lynn Burdekin's more restrained approach to the image too (it's my favourite of the bunch actually), maybe just a tiny bit more contrast to give some more volume to the scene and I think it would be perfect ;-) . And you're right about the 'eyeball time'; even before reading this post I looked at my version today and I it seemed a bit over-cooked. I have a tendency towards it because much of my B&W conversions at work are for commercial use and require a certain 'punch.'"

First of all, many thanks to everyone who sent me their conversions of the picture yesterday or this morning. I've gotten about a hundred and fifty as I begin writing this post, so obviously I can't show them all, but, just as obviously, the more the merrier for me. It was fun to see them all, as it was fascinating to read your comments. Thanks very much to one and all.

I'll limit the ones I'll show to a dozen or two—and they won't just be the ones I think are "best." I don't think there's any "this is best" in play here, actually; at no time did I find myself thinking in terms of "best" or "worst." I'm not saying I like everybody's equally (this isn't kindergarten, and I don't) or that you should, but I took the exercise at its face value—people are imposing on the picture how they like to see B&W, or how they like to see this image in B&W. So, okay. We're all essentially talking about our own tastes. Not a contest.

First of all, here's mine:

I'd play it pretty straight; this is definitely informed by my style with film. The key for me is to go up to the cliff's edge but not over it with those tempting clouds. I'd want them to have a nice rich glow in the print but stay gentle.

I should mention, though, that if I were printing an image like this for real—with an inkjet printer or in the darkroom, either one—I would consider this the guide print stage. The next step would be to put the print up on the viewing board for 1–3 days and look at it. Sooner or later, I would know how I felt about it, and then I'd know what I wanted to do with it...whether I wanted to take it further, or dial it back, or change something, or leave it as-is, whatever. Not till that point would I go make the final version. 

To me, that interval is a critically important stage of making a fine print. A little time going by does wonders to clarify your mind. Call it eyeball time. The looking is what does the work.

Several readers, like Mark Muse, made conversions that were quite close to mine—maybe differing in detail, but not in overall feel. Walter Glover's was very close to mine but he added a rich sepia color, as he confessed to "a hankering for warm-tone or Chloro-Bromide prints." Others, for instance Mark Steigelman, Carl Root and Jim Bullard, took the same basic vibe but went a little hotter and darker.

Perhaps the closest doppelgänger of mine was sent in by Ricardo Silva Cordeiro, who's a graphic designer by trade. If you look closely—the differences are subtle—you'll notice that he's gone for a little harder sharpness in the land area and a little less in the sky. And note how that choice emphasizes the contrasting corporeality or materiality of the elements in the picture: his tree's a bit more of a solid object and his clouds a little more vaporous. Certainly a defensible choice.

Lynn Burdekin's made me feel like Ricardo and I had gone a little too far and hadn't kept it soft enough. "To me this is a 'Rural Romantic' image," Lynn writes, "so I wanted to bring out a soft, romantic feel—as if I were a painter admiring the scene from an easel, rather than a photographer holding a camera."

Here's one of the several "sepia" treatments—this one is from Steve Lincoln. "This was fun. I used CS5, a B&W adjustment layer with some blue and cyan tweaks, a layer mask to lighten the foreground.... Then I converted to a bronze duo-tone and added a border, which the duo-tone renders in a nice creamy off-white. I often use the bronze duo-tone for this type of landscape—looks great in print."

Steve spotted out the hawk!

One of the first ones to come in, from Animesh Ray, shows a very different approach to tonality, especially in the balance between sky and land. To me it makes it look like much later in the evening. I like the tonality of some of Animesh's film pictures and even featured one on the blog once! But his choice here is much more radical than what I've chosen.

Speaking of tonality, let your eyes go back and forth between Sergey Botvin's restrained, almost plainspoken interpretation and Simon Crofts' more florid "verging-on-IR" take, below:

Those are very different photographs.

Implying no criticism of Simon's choices, I will say I admire Sergey's version. It's got a no-nonsense quality to it, sort of the opposite of some of the most over-the-top versions. Jeff Hohner's was quite close to Sergey's. Neither calls attention to technique, and that can be a plus.

We'll get to some other issues in the next post (Part II), but before I close this one I'll just note that with so many entries, there was naturally a range of the basic tonal choices. Some people made the blacks blacker, some dodged under the tree; some increased the sturm und drang of the clouds and some deemphasized them. I'll leave you with two tonal outliers. Rory O'Toole, in the upper of these last two pictures, has made the clouds light and ethereal, while simultaneously lightening the land and greatly increasing its contrast. Neils Volkmann, in the lower picture, has darkened everything, especially the clouds (although you'll notice he uses much less contrast in the field and trees):

We're thoroughly into "technique head" here (i.e., a technical mindset), but see if you can back off from that for a moment and just look at these two pictures in terms of their emotional effect and the overall sense that they'd communicate to you if either were the only version of this picture you'd ever seen. They convey very different "weather reports," and the "feeling-tone" they convey is greatly divergent as well.

I'm not sure I could support the following convincingly in a debate, but I've heard—and I think I believe—that the best printers tend to be the ones who go beyond "applications of technique" and think mostly about the feel of what they're trying to convey. What sense should this simple picture impart to viewers? Is its fidelity to the actual weather conditions important to you or not? How much is the picture "about" the birds? (They're emphasized in Rory's version, you'll note, and almost unnoticeable in Niels's.) I'm not saying the feel of either of these is wrong or right—they're just artistic choices, that any photographer would be applying to any picture they'd taken themselves. But it runs a considerable gamut, especially in black-and-white.

In the next post, we'll get into the issue of transforming the picture into something entirely separate from the observable scene.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Thanks for being good sports about my quirky post yesterday. It's just something I've had in mind to do for a couple of weeks now, and I had fun doing it. (It went mildly viral, too, because yesterday our traffic hit a three-month high.) The exercise has some interesting complexity to it, some of which was only touched upon tangentially in the Comments; we could talk.

Larry McMurtry, the book author and screenwriter, used to have a bookstore in Washington, D.C. called "Booked Up." I was talking to him once as he went through some boxes of books someone had brought in to sell, and he mentioned offhandedly that there was nothing in the boxes he'd never seen. This surprised me, so I questioned him about it, and he said something to the effect that he only rarely encountered books he had never seen before. He had more or less "seen it all."

At this point, with me, it's kind of like that with photographs. One of the nice things about beginning in photography—which of course I'll never experience again—is that everything is new and fresh—everything you do and everything you see. There's an excitement to that that's a lot of fun. Gradually, "seen it" takes over, and "something I've never seen before" has gotten to be more and more important to me as a critical litmus test. I still do encounter genuinely original work, but, even so, most photography is derivative. Having seen so many photographs over so many years—and having a really good visual memory—I sometimes think I see things in photographs that other people don't pick up on: the styles that have influenced the photographer, the things they're going for and the things they're ignoring, what cues they're sensitive to and which they are clueless about. I can even detect, sometimes, the identity of the photographers they admire (this was admittedly easier in the film era, because technique was a major clue—as the "1987" picture yesterday, especially, was meant to humorously indicate).

I think I could deconstruct yesterday's post at bitter length, but to do so might be "longer than it is interesting," to quote one of my father's many sayings. Certainly, one thing it does demonstrate is that with Photoshop and a digital picture file you can "mimic" the look of various common or once-common techniques. What might be less obvious is that the conventions of more recent times are very much a "style" as well—because with digital you could choose alternate qualities if you wanted to. Nobody's forcing people to kill every cloud they see by jumping all over it with way too much HDR. There's no reason why you can't go for gentle low contrast and subtlety if that's what you enjoy.

So here's an exercise, if you have the interest and the time. I've uploaded (I think—I'm new to the site) the full JPEG of yesterday's file to SmugMug (if I've made any stupid mistakes in the upload, I hope somebody will inform me). If you want to, you can try downloading it and converting it to B&W yourself. Another thing yesterday's post implies (or should have) is that there's no "one way" to convert a file to B&W; the choices you might make are effectively infinite, and many of them change the look and the effect of the picture quite substantially. If you choose to show us your own conversion, it could say a lot about the properties of a black-and-white picture that you yourself value...your own taste, how you think B&W ought to look, the ways in which it looks good to you.

If you feel like it, email a small (800-pixel wide) JPEG of your interpretation to me and I'll throw some of 'em up on the site. You can add your comments or not, whatever you want.

Mike

P.S. Oh, and by the way, the picture was taken with my 12-MP Panasonic GF1 and 20mm ƒ/1.7 lens, and all of yesterday's "versions" were done in Photoshop CS5—not terribly adroitly I'm afraid.

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

1940

(Graflex Speed Graphic, 127mm Ektar, Kodak Verichrome Safety Film, D-23 [scratch mixed], Wratten K-2.) 

-

1965

(Pentax Spotmatic, 55mm Takumar ƒ/1.8 lens, stop-down averaging metering, Ilford HP3 ASA 400 film.) 

-

1987

(Hasselblad 500 C/M with Acute-Matte, 80mm ƒ/2.8 Zeiss Planar, Tri-X 320, HC-110 dilution B, orange filter. Shadows placed on Zone II. Oriental Seagull, lightly selenium toned.)

-

2001

(3.1 megapixel Minolta DiMAGE 5, converted in Photoshop 5.5. Unsharp mask. Uploaded to PhotoSIG.)

-

2012

(Panasonic mirrorless, OIS zoom, RAW, Lightroom 3, SilverEfex Pro. "Original in color.")

-

Mike

Illustrations are simulations.

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Featured [partial] Comment by Andrew Molitor: "I think it would be fascinating to correlate birth date with preferred image. Born: 1965 Prefer: 1987."

Featured Comment by Patrick: "Probably going to regret this but...I like the last one most. In my defence, I am looking at these on my phone."

Mike replies: Okay, made me laugh.

Featured [partial] Comment by SteveB: "...Seriously, if we're going to compare the look of different equipment and processes, wouldn't actual pictures be a better comparison?"

Mike replies: I would have, but my HP3 and Verichrome sheet film are both out of date.

(I'm kidding, I would never have, even if the old materials still existed...way too much work!)

Featured Comment by Ed Hawco: "Actually, this would be a better representation of the 2012 version. Instagram, with 'Lo-fi' filter. ;-) "

I didn't want to steal Ctein's thunder on Thursday, but it might be worth noting that the subject he wrote about is perhaps the clearest instance I can think of where his opinion and mine are more or less opposed. I've argued many times and sometimes at length that photographs differ from art in that they often have significance and meaning that goes beyond their visual content.

I'm sure I could deal with a visit to Pier 24 just fine; I usually don't have much problem getting with the program and going with the flow, experiencing things as they're presented. I will say that I would generally rather look at the kind of photographs that need words than those that don't. (My all-time favorite photography book is one which gives equal weight to words and pictures—meaning, far more weight to words than usual.) I more often have too little information about what I'm looking at than too much. Even, many times, with pictures the photographers want to present as wordless art. Photography isn't just art.

What it comes down to is perhaps that titles, captions, context and explication are just one more area of creative potential for any photographer, who can choose to utilize them or not depending on their own judgment, taste, and intentions. And whether you prefer to know the context or meaning of a photograph or not might merely depend on what kind of photograph you're looking at: some kinds of pictures don't require words; with others, it's a travesty to strip away the vital story of what the picture is a picture of. Many pictures alone are just mute illustrations of lost stories, silent witnesses, their significance buried and gone.

But that's just my opinion. The broader point is that every writer on this site is speaking for themselves. Including me. We often do have similar points of view. But sometimes we don't.

Mike

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Strictly speaking, I suppose most photographs are "naturalistic," because most camera operators don't have the skill or the guile to make them into anything else. Ironically, however—even strangely—most casual photographers also lack the taste to use the inherent naturalism of photography to their advantage.

But before I get trapped down a rathole, though, a few random-ish examples of naturalism in photography. Obviously, there are thousands. These pictures, like all pictures, are illustrations and evidence, not argument or proof.

Photo by Mark Brautigam

• Mark Brautigam. I like this set a lot, probably because the pictures resemble the place where I live (Wisconsin). I've actually been to a couple of these spots.

From the Kingston Collection

• Demotic snaps that happen to have that Barthsian "punctum." This used to be called "the snapshot aesthetic" and is now called "vernacular photography." Note that the appropriation of snapshot naturalism is all over the place, from Nan Goldin, to Ryan McGinley's young nakeds cavorting and gamboling (his shots would look naturalistic except that everybody's always naked, a blatant telltale of hip styliness), to this shot by Martin Parr, which uses the style of naturalism beautifully but isn't an example of it—it's an advertising photograph, and the woman is a model.

Just as an aside, anyone who thinks that all or most snapshots have the snapshot aesthetic hasn't looked through enough unsorted, uncurated snapshots. (I have. I am not bragging.)

Weegee, Murder in Hell's Kitchen, 1942. Note that he would have photographed this in the dark—the light comes from his flashbulb.

• Many news photographs have the prospect of being naturalistic but many still aren't. An approximate Venn diagram can be usefully plotted by looking at the many attempts made over the years to find the overlap between reportage and art, in the works of artists (cf. some of the early Magnum manifestos, or in the work of photographers such as Josef Koudelka) and in projects such as John Szarkowski's From the Picture Press, in which he attempted to formulate a corpus of artworks culled from newspaper archives. (News photographs usually come with their punctum readymade; blood on pavement will do that for you.)

Lee Friedlander, Arelene and Alan Distler, New York, New York, 1969

• The 35mm work of Lee Friedlander. Naturalism is far from the point of early Friedlander—he is a "trickster" (in the folkloric sense of that term), a hunter of found views, and the word that best describes his work before he got old and mellow is iconoclast—but his seeing is naturalistic.

Photo by Kate Hutchinson

• Kate Hutchinson. I don't follow Kate as avidly as I used to, because I'm just not as interested in her husband as she is (is that sexism? Is there any real reason, other than a slouching voyeurism, why I should be less interested in Kate Hutchinson's husband than in, say, Harry Callahan's wife?) And I suspect you have to look at a lot of her work to "get" her—she's not a single-picture artist; her aesthetic is revealed slowly, gently, across many photographs contemplated at leisure. But I love Kate. (Note that she's no amateur—she's an editorial photographer with an impressive client list.)

Linda McCartney, Jim Morrison

• And while we're on to female photographers, Linda McCartney. Yes, I'm one of "those people" who think that Linda would have been better known and better thought of if she hadn't been an über-celebrity's spousal unit. But Sir Paul's wealth and his persistence in honoring his "baby" have meant that we've gotten a broader-than-usual window into her art. She's not a first-tier artist, no matter how good a case the advocates might make (although she's very good, as I say)—but her work reveals a first-tier person, you might say, never immodest. Naturalism isn't always her modus—she tried different techniques like any hobbyist, such as Polaroid transfer, for one—but it often is. She certainly wasn't afraid of it.

And by the way, the new book at the link is the best overview of Linda, with the one single rather major dissonance that she's not a coffee-table-book type of artist. To me she's the apotheosis of the gifted and unfettered adolescent, a free spirit who was able to stay true to herself throughout life. Her books ought to be little gems, with a private, personal feel, rather than big bold tomes.

Photo by Jacques Henri Lartigue

• Lartigue's childhood work might be the best case for naturalism as a mode of photography. Sometimes when people look at sophisticated work in the snapshot aesthetic, they say "anyone could do that," oblivious to the obvious fact that almost no one can—and Lartigue's early work—his artistic peak—demonstrates the absurdity of a similar louche criticism, "a child could do that."

James Ravilious, Hedger's Tea Break: Reg Mules

• Can too much skill in composition fight against the sense of effortlessness we look for in naturalism? If not, then I nominate James Ravilious, another personal favorite. As Friedlander's essentially a subversive, so Ravilious is essentially a romantic, but his seeing is naturalistic too.

Mike Johnston, Zander at 14

• Me. Most of my work is naturalistic, because that's what I like.

Enough yet? I could go on. (I do go on. It's the blogger's brief.) Naturalism's not a way of rendering, or a technical aim—it's not trompe l'oeil and it has little to do with verisimilitude—and it doesn't have to do with any particular subject matter. Importantly, it's not an end in itself; it's not all a photograph needs to have in order to work. It certainly doesn't imply that the end result happens naturally, or without effort (please, y'all). It's a method of approach, an attitude—a way of accepting what is, of taking what you're given, of letting the world in, being satisfied with reality, comfortable with happenstance and accident. How you then process that and select from it is just what makes you you.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Ed Hawco: "Like you, I prefer naturalism in photography, and I'm a little bit shaken by how accurately you encapsulated and illustrated the concept. My brain is going flippy-flop, thinking 'yes, that's it exactly! Why couldn't you say it so well?'

"Since I'm thinking about what I like so much about naturalistic photography, I am naturally wondering why I have so little interest in phantasmagorical imagery, and I think what it comes down to is that I'm just not that interested in things that are simply 'made up.' I cannot understand the appeal of a woman in a flowery dress holding a big-horn sheep while an old steam train drives by. I have no idea what that means beyond 'whoa, that's trippy!' The same applies to 'constructed' images, such as those by Jeff Wall and the like. I understand that it's a commentary on the nature of reality and all that; I just don't care. Let me comment on the nature of reality while looking at something real, not while looking at something that is so obviously non-real.

"That said, I do understand that some people like that sort of thing. I'm not saying they're wrong (to each his or her own), just that I don't get it. I will also confess to some level of prejudice to what I tend to see in some of the fans of that type of work—perhaps erroneously—as a lack of curiosity about the real world.

"One place where I see this play out is in the comments on 500px.com. I frequently come upon striking photographs of places—usually cities but sometimes mountain ranges or other sorts of dramatic landscapes. The person who posted the image has not indicated in the title or the tags where the photograph was taken (which is to say, what it's a photograph of). What follows is a dozen or more fawning compliments and ecstatic exhortations on what a beautiful 'capture' it is, and how the post-processing is so gorgeous and all that. But nobody asks 'where?'

"In other words, people are only looking at the picture and not at the subject. I like to think they should be interested in both!

"You could argue that the 'where' is irrelevant, and perhaps from the point of view of rigorous photographic evaluation it is. (As it is from the point of view of 'OMG that's so awesome!') But what about the real-world, or 'naturalistic' side? Aren't these people curious?

"I am! I may love (or hate) the photograph for various reasons, but I'm also very curious about the planet we live on, what things look like in different places, and what different places look like. It's a layer of meaning that applies to all visual representations—or so I would like to think. How can they not be curious as to where those incredible mountains are, or what city houses that dramatic cobblestone street?

"That prejudice carries over to the people fawning over the trippy photograph of the woman holding the sheep. I don't care about the photograph because it raises no questions and provokes no curiosity. I don't care what it means because it doesn't mean anything. And I can't help but feel a bit of disdain for people who get excited about something that is, to me at least, meaningless.

"One final note: I think one of the main reasons why naturalistic photography is not as widely regarded as we might like is because it doesn't always gob-smack you on first viewing. You nailed it when you said of Kate Hutchinson, 'she's not a single-picture artist; her aesthetic is revealed slowly, gently, across many photographs contemplated at leisure.' That's often the case with this type of photography. I had a similar reaction with Ryan McGinley's work. First reaction was a simple 'WTF?' But over time, and when viewed in clusters, you really start to see that there's something going on there.

"But in today's Flickry, Facebooked, Twittered, and Instagramed world (all services that I use, BTW), stuff that requires a second look or a bit of thought tends to be backgrounded to the woman with the sheep and the steam train. Which would be even better in HDR!"