You really pull out a nice composition out of that place, I mean, that street it has a weird angle.

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really nice .. what lens are you using ?

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_{This Is Freedom ?}

thanks, this was a steep hill which I knew the wide-angle would exaggerate. I just wish I had raised the camera a bit to lessen the circus distortion on the house, though that same distortion does make all the leaning poles on the left more interesting...

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_{Taste is the enemy of art.}

thanks man

the Hasselblad 903SWC has a fixed 38mm Biogon lens. The Biogon design is great in that it has zero distortion, but it has to sit millimeters away from the film, so the camera has no mirror and instead composition is done through an external scope and focusing is done using distance focusing marked on the lens barrel.

My only real complaint is that there is a fair bit of natural vignetting, especially when focusing further away, and being natural from the Biogon design rather than optical like most wide-angles, stopping down doesn't lessen the vignetting. I would like it if Hasselblad had released a center filter to correct for vignetting, but they never did. I could use lower contrast film to reduce the vignetting, but I like high contrast film so I'm just going to have to live with it.

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_{Taste is the enemy of art.}

The only part in which I can see the distortion on the house is on the right side, but as with the poles, it doesn't look bad. Actually, the one I find a bit odd because of the distortion is the car.

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How do you choose your compositions? I really like this one, with all the hills and angles, it feels almost like a surreal version of suburban life (especially with the framing), but some of your other photos I don't understand at all.

Also, does your camera make the photos square-like cropped, or is that you afterwards?

Thanks I don't frame with regard to the content so much as I do it with regard to how the forms are proportioned, interact and relate, relying primarily on intuition. Texture, light and depth also figure into what makes an image "good". I try to forget about the subject and look at the visual forms and pretend that that's all there is. It's all about how the eyes will move around the image when it is viewed, how to make it feel aesthetic.

I don't think I can describe it much better than that; it's like how some people are sensitive to music and understand how to arrange the sounds to make it aesthetic to their ears and can instantly replay sequences of notes that they hear, the same is true of images and the visual sense. It's a built-in logic that is largely subconscious.

Like music, to an extent that logic can be learned, but if it isn't a natural ability, I think the full appreciation can never be realized. And even then, those with a natural inclination for the visual will get better and will understand more as they look and practice; they may not understand things at first much more than someone without that inclination.

Lee Friedlander is one of the foremost masters of the formal aesthetic qualities of an image. You should take a look at his work, it is truly outstanding.

Hasselblad film cameras make square images; there is no cropping. I hate cropping in general, I think it represents a failure to properly frame an image, though sometimes it is necessary. I think if someone wants a 2:3 aspect image, they should use a DSLR, 35mm or 6x9 film. Likewise, if they want square, they should get a camera that makes square images and will have a square viewfinder.

Each aspect ratio is very different for composition. I chose square because it is very equally weighted through the image and because it is a format that isn't often seen (our natural vision is more wide than it is high, so ratios like 2:3 will always seem more natural than the square).

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_{Taste is the enemy of art.}

Wow, thank you for the response. I looked up Lee Friedlander, and do see the aesthetic you are describing, both in his work and yours. Thank you for the explanation as well; looking around your gallery again, I see the elements you are talking about, though some photos strike me as better or worse suited for it.

Particularity, 0134_12, 0136_05, this one, and some other recent ones strike me as a great examples of the aesthetic. (and the your invisible city series is just awesome lightplay and conceptuality) Some of your other shots though, especially ones with trees as major visual elements fall short of the whole idea of 'form'; maybe its just a personal preference, but the trees and some fences seem too abstract, too cluttered, too broken up to have a concrete form, and succeed as texture instead (when they are in the background rather than foreground).

The square frame does seem particularly well suited for this format though, as like you said, it does present a format that "isnt often seen/not natural" and so dispenses the reality that the photograph usually conveys as a "still image of the eye" into a more art oriented realm. Cool

Your philosophy of aesthetic thinking reminds me a lot of surrealism photography though, despite the fact that you seem to be making real life, rather than abstract points, aesthetic.

Once again, thank you for the thoughtful reply; I'm going through my own photography now to consider it, never really gave much of a thought to it before you pointed it out.

I'm a big fan of non-representational work, though with photography it is always a necessary reduction into abstraction since the camera is a recorder of representation by its nature. Form can be more than broad solid areas; it can be defined with line as well, which is where bare tree branches can become very useful, and these affect how the eye is going to move through the image as well as being useful for creating balance and a dynamic feeling. Most of the tree images are an extension of what you did in your image Flowers VI (quite a good image), and are just trying to find new ways to use those elements. Flowers VI is definitely about the tree branches. The flowers could be edited completely out or the image converted to black and white and the composition and image itself would not suffer at all.

About the square frame—exactly It calls into question the representational qualities of the image and reminds the viewer of the photographer's involvement.

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_{Taste is the enemy of art.}