Sand of time in your hands. by Lileinaya

Critique Sand of time in your hands by Lileinaya

Disclaimer: I am not a professional photographer either by vocation or education. My experience with photography originates in my knowledge gleaned from having been a model and from my minor educational exposure to some photography classes taken haphazardly through the years.

The image of the young woman on the sand, in combination with its title, is evocative and suggestive of deeper meanings. The photograph is heavily backlit with an overall bleed of warm colors from the models orange-red dress. The focal length of the photograph is shallow with the focal plane narrowed to the model’s hands. The flow of sand from the hands themselves has been captured by using a short exposure time. The play between mode on the camera, aperture and speed of exposure, as well as the strong back lighting have combined to make the sand the actual center of focus in the image.

Classified as Portraiture and Emotional I find that it does suffer from some issues with the technical manner chosen by the photographer, and choices made in the photographic capture process, and possibly from post-capture processing. First, the backlighting while romantic in the resulting fogged quality of the background has prevented the models face and expression from being clearly visible. As a ‘portrait’ that is problematic. As an emotional photograph I suppose it serves the artist’s desire; however, due to the image size (information load and dimensions) being so small, the ‘affect’ of the hands is overwhelmed and lost. It took me quite a bit of squinting to actually verify that there was sand dropping from the models right hand.

Composition: The light and dark diffused background heavily loaded left and right and open behind the model create a ‘U’ pathway directly to the central figure of the model. There is a normal (hmm) path of travel for human brains when observing a member of the species. While this normative travel varies by gender and culture, the photographer has subverted it for the pathways chosen by default by this viewer; and for males of my culture as well. My eye travel would normally dwell, in a portrait, upon face, and then to hair, then to bare shoulder, then down the hand to jewelry upon wrists and hands then to dress. A male’s would center upon breasts, hands shoulders, face. This compositional translation defeats those due to the technical issues identified above. My focus transitioned first bright bleed of light on left, unfocused face, distraction of wrist band bracelet (which may have been intentionally done by the photographer as this seems to be more a study of hands with an attempt at etherealness by back lighting and narrow focal length).

I’m in a sort of quandary with this work, it might easily be resolved by reclassification of the photograph as simply conceptual and omitting the ‘Portrait’ portion. Certainly portraits have been made where lack of focus and lighting are used to create an ‘emotional’ portrait rather than a more ‘pure’ one; somehow this photograph fails to achieve that for this viewer. Translation of the image to grey scale or black and white might alter that lack of emotive concentration. I did not download the image or ‘save’ it to see what effect that might have.