This Monochrome Monday I thought I would show a pretty heavy crop example. This is taken at a nearby harbour before all of the boats were in the water. Since the lakes freeze over with ice around 50 centimetres thick, the boats must all come out by late Autumn or their hulls will be crushed. I like shooting in this location at different times of the year.
I did a heavy crop on this to show that with shots such as this (long exposure) it is possible to do and still maintain decent quality without it getting too heavily grained. You can see that there is grain though but in black and white, I actually don't mind the texture of it as in my opinion, black and white 'should' be a little degraded.
I do also like the very, very sharp black and whites too sometimes, and there are some great examples of those around these days. This has been made easier by the equipment photographers use now and the fact that they don't have to develop it onto paper as the enlarging from film will soften edges too.
I included the original so you can see the area it has been cropped from. I obviously straightened my crooked stance. Well, I didn't have a tripod with me and leaned the camera on a pole so the angle is what it was. Cropping can change the story of the picture quite dramatically as it changes the focal points and main subject matter. In the original below, the lit boat is what draws the eye first and the small boat in the water is irrelevant noise.
In the crop, there is a juxtaposition between the out of water boat and the small boat has become much more prominent and important to the image. You could imagine that there is a David and Goliath battle where size has slowed the large so it no longer is capable of its original purpose and the leaning light with one globe blown highlights this, while the small boat goes about its business.
When something gets large enough, attention is drawn to it and this creates a more vulnerable position as both successes and failures become more prominent. The successes are often downplayed but the failures are emphasised as many like to see the tall fall heavily.
Imagine seeing someone shoplift a candy bar from the corner store. You watch them look around cautiously to see if someone is watching but don't notice you and then quickly shave the bar into their pocket and move away. Now imagine that person was the leader of your country.
This is the same with the self-voting comments here. If a big fish does it, it is obviously going to drain the pool and be quite noticeable as the light is always on them. Many of the little fish do not like this behaviour as they watch the rewards fall dramatically. But, when a hundred thousand little fish do it? No one sees and it goes unmentioned.
Perhaps it is because people feel more sympathetic to the little fish in some way. Watching a child steal a candy bar can be justified perhaps as the child may not know any better or be hungry but watching someone like the leader of a country, who has the means and definitely should know better do it, comes across as very wrong to most.
Most people were outraged and Trump's 'pussy grabbing' comments a while ago, but many women have had such things happen to them at bars by drunk guys at some point. Why is there the double standard? Why isn't each incident reported?
We are hypocritical by nature I think as when it comes to ourselves and people like us, we can justify our bad behaviour through necessity or because of external pressures we cannot control. We don't however carry that charity through to others, especially those we do not like or those that are larger than us.
We see their bad behaviour as the reason for our position perhaps an that becomes the catalyst for our own poor actions. I guess it comes down to personal morals and ethics. Most don't seem to want to look to closely at their own actions though.
I am guessing if you got this far, you weren't expecting a photography post to go this way... Neither was I. Perhaps if I had cropped the picture differently it wouldn't have.
Shot details:
[ Olympus EM-1 | ISO400 | 40mm | f4 | 3.2s ]
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]
I like it how the crop and the switch to black and white change the mood entirely. The result has an eerie feeling of abandonment, loneliness and even desperation (at least in my perception) while the original shot actually feels crowded and much more ordinary.
As far as your sharp left turn in the post goes, I am personally not a fan of self-upvoting as far as it is about comments on other people posts. Upvoting your own post when posting feels like a regular part of the platform and the culture and that seems to be by design (you have the self-upvote checkbox checked by default). Giving you post the initial boost that your Steem Power allows is fair in my book even in regard to whales. But squeezing all your votes and keeping them for your own comments instead of spreading the love to other people's posts that you find deserving is too self-serving and completely defeats the purpose of the platform.
I personally find the new voting power degradation curve quite frustrating as I don't have enough Steem to adjust the slider to 25%, but I really feel like giving out more than 10 upvotes per day. I might actually have to switch to eSteem for upvoting purposes since it allows control for that regardless of the amount of Steem Power one holds. I personally think it's unreasonable to withhold the feature from smaller accounts on Steemit after the changes that were done in HF19.
That is a good point with the slider, I don't know why it is withheld.
Upvoting own posts I understand as lioke you said but giving 50 dollars to 'Cool!' I am not a fan of. It is just greed.
My guess would be that when this feature was designed or when the limit was introduced, accounts that had under 500SP would have too small of an upvote anyway, so making their votes even smaller might have been viewed as pointless and just allowing them to cast just too many virtually meaningless votes. The thing is now when the maximum voting power went up, people that don't have access to the slider can't really revert to the old setting and are forced to either be stingy with their votes (which I hate) or to allow their voting power to drop to really low levels. I personally experienced that last week while I was not watching my votes, so my ability to upvote with even of small value had pretty much disappeared because I consistently overshot the 10 upvotes per day mark. So I was stuck casting low value votes anyway without the ability to regulate that properly and spread my SP a bit more evenly without being stingy with it.
And on you other point, a one word comment with a 50 dollar reward is bound to look fishy and uncool regardless of the way the value got there - selfvote or not.
I know the issue as some of my family are here awaiting a slider and they are in the same boat that would like to vote more but feel they can't. Perhaps it will be cleared up in the future.
Yes, there are very few reasons for a comment to get that kind of support.
Excellent article and fascinating photos.
WOW YOUR PICS ARE AMAZING keep exploring @tarazkp
Nice shots man. Those are great photos and I enjoyed the story. Thanks for taking the time to share. Nice series.
beautiful!
wow, that's really beautiful! I love them both, but particularly love what you've done with the mono crop, well done!
Upvoted!
nice post
Its cool