donolea wrote:
Our friend and fellow "hogger", Jim-Pops posted this original photo titled "Chance shot with Harley" on Tuesday. I told him I loved it and had an idea have some fun with it. The Greenwood's surprise musical guest is country music legend Johhny Lee from Alta Loma, Texas. My original shot of Johhny was from inside a local club here in Nashville as we were getting ready for our lunch break during shooting.
What do ya think?
I was at first impressed by this picture. Impressed how easily two entirely separate images could be merged into something reasonably believable and many points should be awarded for your imagination.
That believability however soon began to unravel when I looked a little closer.
I have delayed this response in order to enable everyone else who chose to provide their critique to do so and I am surprised that no one has picked up on the following discrepancies in the detail that lessen the overall success of this photo merge.
I would like to offer the following with only the best intention to provide meaningful critique with a view that it may cause you to be more self critical in your future work.
Although you have done a fairly decent job of extracting the man from his background closer inspection reveals that the throttle cables on the motorcycle appear to pass through his arm which in itself is probably a minor lapse of attention to detail forgiven for having been overlooked.
A little more distracting though is that the overall processing quality of the man does not match that of the motorcycle or it's background. Also overlooked is that although the bike is throwing strong shadows on the ground there is no evidence of appropriate shows on the man’s body.
A note to those who commented, the angle of the shadows indicates that the sun is approximately 45 degrees from upper right and proper examination of the angle of the mirror to that light source would rule out any notion of there being reflection on his face.
Much more important however is an issue that requires me to digress a little for a moment.
There is much and constant discussion of the advantages of shooting raw because it allows better control of the final image than straight out of the camera jpegs.
Few people would dispute this but it relies entirely on the ability of the person using the software to actually see what is there in the resulting image that presents before them.
When people present their finished images in sections such as this and others I have to ask what advantage is there to ask for critique when those providing it are seemingly as insensitive to detail and correct colour as is evidenced by the responses here.
That said then it is otherwise a very nice picture of a bright orange man on a bike.