Sharp Water


That is one sharp waterfall! It sure does contrast nicely with that blurry bridge…

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32 Comments

  1. That woman’s posture makes my back ache. And when I look at this photo, it’s as if I’m looking through squinted eyes, like hers.

  2. skynigurl

    This looks better with my glasses off :/

  3. Fantastic bokeh! How does one capture such a shot?

  4. whenever i feel not good enough..this page always makes me feel like a pro 🙂

  5. monolith

    Maybe we’re the dumb ones. Perhaps the avant garde photographer meant it as an art piece. The rounded shoulders, the mouthbreather-esque, blank-eyed gazes, the backwards cap; these resonate strongly as symbolism for the proletariat. The carefully disincorporated, Gaussian background (encompassing our Everypeople’s heads) connotes a world forever out of reach, including their very minds. Their souls. Ultrasharp water is, of course, the God presence: omniscient, cold, a thounsandfoldth more clear than a common human presence.

    It’s a brilliant art piece. I hear they’re featuring it at the Duluth Piggly Wiggly.

    • Dexy Wexy

      I feel like you put more effort into this comment than the fauxtographer did into this image.

  6. Its original! Everyone shoots to blur the water. I especially love the black eye sockets. And the wanna be gangster, cocktail waitress, and illigitimate child group photo is always special.

  7. I’d guess it’s someone who has seen other photos – by other photographers – with the subjects in focus and the background blurry, thus giving a 3-D effect to the image, And they had no clue how to achieve it with the camera (maybe they think the “A” camera setting stands for “Avoid because it’s too complicated for me”), so they thought they’d do it with some blur effect. Yeah, didn’t quite work out, did it?

    • Popples

      I think they just thought the background was ugly. So they blurred anything except the “pretty” water.

  8. They are using a hyper-tilt-shift layer masking lens with ultra feather enabled. But, considering the ‘tog’s profile pic; the “blown out white circle with eyes”.. Safe to assume they knew what they were doing.

  9. They probably figured the use of a large aperture or long lense was totally devoid of creativity by negating common practice and implementing Gaussian blur to stand in for bokeh. Doesn’t photoshop have the option for lens blur?

    • enchantedkatie

      I had to go look…Yup, PS 6 has a whole section of different blurs. Wow, as long as I have been using PS..I have never needed those…

      • nice.. I can’t find a suitable reason for why you would need fake blur.. it trips me out.. It takes 2 seconds to set dof mechanically/optically in camera and probably god knows how long for ^^ that hack job

    • cameraclicker

      Photoshop has Lens Blur. I use it once in a while. It gives excellent results, but like almost everything else in Photoshop, you have to know how to drive. That sharp water mess is only two minutes effort. To do it properly might take ten minutes, the people would not be difficult to mask out and with a couple of layers of different strengths of blur it could look convincing. But why would anyone bother, there are so many things wrong with it, why try to salvage it!

  10. A photographer

    In the past people have asked me why I use expensive bulky lenses on 35mm cameras to get shallow depth of field when it’s a cinch to do it in Photoshop with any camera.

    This is why.

  11. Where does one find a lens with 2 focal planes?

  12. Popples

    Does that woman even have eyes?

  13. apart from the obvious stuff that’s wrong… where’s the kids other leg?

  14. Bizarre. Just plain bizarre!

  15. And they chose to shoot at high noon, ensuring hard shadows, glare and squinty eyes. Or is that glaring squinty eyes? Why are people so skeered to shoot in the shade?!

    Lovin’ the highly oversharpened water, takes me back to the good ol days when I was learning PS Elements 🙂

  16. The difference between a great photographer and a good photographer is the ability to “see light” the author of this image has no understanding of seeing light. once one understands how to see, bend, reflect, refract, and defuse light, your photography will improve quantum.
    This takes years of experience, sadly the family probably bought this image, cheaply and digitally, based on emotion not on portrait art. Tilnak

  17. The blur make this picture PRO !

  18. They obviously have no idea how DOF works lol

  19. Saige Brody

    I’m fairly certain that this picture was taken in my hometown. Sooo many photographers and fauxtographers here that I’m surprised this one is the first one I’ve spotted. lol.

  20. one word “terrible”

  21. OH DEAR. Where do you start?
    What is it with that mans head? He has a black hole where the top pf his head is. The womans blurry head and arm? In fact how did the photographer manage this whole mess?

  22. Superballs

    Actually, what appalls me the most is the amount of effort the tog put into this.

    They masked or selected the people and the waterfall and the rock and made a new layer out of that.

    They used a gaussian blur on the entire image and then layered the sharp people over the blurred layer.
    You can tell this by the fact that the people are blurred around the sharp layer.

    It’s sad that so much effort went into this.

    For fake DOF, cut what should be on the focal plane out and use lens blur with a graduated filter (black to white) from bottom to top. I guess it’s better than nothing but seriously, how hard is it to get that done in camera. This image though, should have been deleted before it ever left the SD card.

    Beyond that, going by the angle of the shadows it’s like 3 in the afternoon on the sunniest day in human history.

  23. Yes I understand my price is high, but know that there are many photographers who would be willing to do it for less… And there was.

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