Comments About the 'Yellow' Pictures

Photo by David Stock

I want to thank everybody who participated in the latest "Baker's Dozen" call for work—we received a large-ish number of submissions (about a hundred and sixty) and there were a lot more good ones than were included in the final set.

As usual I could have gone any number of ways with the edit. For example, the three most common subjects among the submissions were road stripes and markings (a number of great ones, but David Stock's simple and whimsical design above won by a whisker for me), flowers, and...little yellow rubber duckie bath toys. At first I thought I would pick a "winner" in all three of those subject-matter categories, but ended up jettisoning that idea in the end as being too programmatic.

The reason was that I was paying attention to sequence. To my mind, the yellows either needed to harmonize or contrast from image to image as you scroll down. The Pressman-Vincent-Poole-Smith sequence (3–6) was decided on pretty early on because they make such a nice progression to the eye, and they're all such super examples of mainstream strategies* that I thought people would identify with. From there we segue to Rich Reusser's picture of daughter Molly—she was a beautiful child and you can almost feel the fatherly adoration emanating from Rich behind the camera, but to me the punctum of that picture is the alarming whatever-you'd-call-it blue of those garish clashing gloves—it took me a long time to acclimate to that! (Additive secondary cyan or aqua is as close as I can come to naming it; the color manages to clash with both Molly's raincoat and Molly.) In Kurt's bathroom picture below Molly, there's a subtle echo of the blue gloves in the not-quite-matching blue of the towel on the rack. I don't think you see that consciously, but try to unsee it now that I've mentioned it.  :-)

As always in editing a set, the problem is flow vs. variety. The cop-out temptation is to pick a set of pictures that are all stylistically similar, but that's almost an affront to the great variety of approaches and subjects you get in any randomly-gathered "group show" (which is really what this amounts to).

And related to that heading, just so you know how much I care about your experience (and my responsibilities), let me just mention as an aside that I received exactly 13 of the aforementioned rubber ducky pictures. [Inset photo by James Hengst.] Do you even know how tempted I was to present all 13 rubber ducky pictures as the entirety of the final 'Yellow' set—as a joke? A joke that would have appealed greatly to the devilish part of my subversive B&W-maven heart. I thought about that idea for three days before I was able to get rid of it. Still kinda makes me chuckle.

Anyway, sequence, and the eye's pleasure in going from one picture to the next with minimal interruption, is why I put the emailed comments from the photographers (if there were any) at the end. I like looking at pictures next to each other, seeing how they play off their neighbors, and to me that's worth the modest inconvenience of separating the texts from the pictures.

Thanks again to everyone who sent work. Honorable mentions include, but are not limited to, Larry Angler, Mike Peters, Bob Gary, Craig Stocks, Marcelo Guarini (loved that one), Scott Campbell, Steve Goldenberg, Cathal Gantly (liked that too), Ricardo Cordeiro, Rod Locket, John Tellaisha, Al DaValle, Douglas Houk, Collin Orthner, Mark E. Johnson, Chris Kern, Ron Mayhew (don't think bringing Ernest Withers into it didn't catch my attention, Ron), Anurag Agnihotri, Animesh Ray, B.D. Parks, Terry Burnes, Randall Teasley, Richard Fox, and Harry Weide. All of their pictures were in the running to the end. There were many more nice ones than that, too.

All much fun for me, so thank you for that.

Finally, in David Stock's picture at the top of this page, do you see the faint faded remnant of an earlier yellow line on the manhole cover? Photographs often show us details we would not have thought to invent.

Mike

* Faux abstract, centered subject, woodsy landscape, critter pic

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Lois Elling: "I was a kid when I saw my first manhole cover with the painted stripe in the wrong position and got such a kick out of it. I still do!"

Matthew O'Brien: "First of all I am not a pixel peeper. I like the Bakers Dozen concept…other than I lose interest between its inception and realisation.

"Aside from that I am curious. I was about to admire the subtle extra line (1<–>1) when I suddenly noticed. The main yellow paint on the manhole cover has a remarkable physical property. It is capable of painting the empty spaces within the grating as well as the cast iron structure. The only elements which should be yellow in the white box below should be cast iron. The gaps should be dark and may contain a few splashes, but should not be the full colour. Maybe there is an interesting explanation. I never would have noticed this if I had not first spotted the 1<–>1 diagonal."

Mike replies: I thought about that too at first (wondering with my reflexive suspicion if there might have been a little Photoshop going on there) but I've observed a road-striping machine in action, and the line, which according to Wikipedia is a sort of thermoplastic resin that has to be pre-heated, goes down onto the road in a thick sort of ribbon, sort of like wet tape. Having seen it, it makes sense to me that it might have enough body when it's new to span small gaps in a grate. If the manhole cover actually is a grate, which I suppose the photo doesn't actually prove. We're getting very geeky here!

Another phil: "Re the manhole, it is unlikely to be a grate, more likely to be indentations to provide a bit of grip for tyres, rather than flat metal which is very slippery when wet. The yellow paint is (as you say) a resin which arrives in blocks and is melted, poured into a 'box' on wheels with a slot on the underside through which the resin flows.(I was a highways civil engineering tech). Longer lines are normally nowadays done with a vehicle which does all the above in one operation. That's also why the original paint still shows in the indentations."

Richard Gonet: "I really enjoyed viewing this collection. Thank you for initiating this project and curating it. Since we all have different tastes in art, I suspect there are some hidden gems in the ones that were not selected. Is there a way to present the 'runners up' so we can see more of the entries? Even a collection of stripes and rubber duckies would be fun to see."

Mike replies: Here are the submissions by Marcelo and Cathal that I mentioned above.

By Marcelo Guarini

By Cathal Gantly

Philomaphos: "Thank you, Mike, for the Baker's Dozen and for your commentary on how you arranged your final choices. I now can't unsee the blue gloves in Richard Reusser's photograph, and I agree with the comments praising Melissa O'Shaughnessy's photograph. I really like the bonus picture by Marcelo Guarini for its quiet, contemplative colour and the mystery it suggests. I agree with Dave Jenkins' comment regarding the photograph by Darren Livingston—it is a striking, unsettling picture. It's been a pleasure to see them all."

Comments

[MikeR]

About those gloves, that funky cyan color is similar to what I got on blown-out highlights with an IR conversion Nikon D100.

[Tom]

"I like looking at pictures next to each other, seeing how they play off their neighbors, and to me that's worth the modest inconvenience of separating the texts from the pictures."

How about a thumb next to the comments, best of both worlds?

PS David Stock's picture wins for me too.

[psu]

Man if I had remembered I'd have sent a duck picture.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/79904144@N00/9982720916/in/album-72157643891594084/

It's even from the same city as the picture you featured. 😀

[Kenneth Tanaka]

”Photographs often show us details we would not have thought to invent.”

And therein lies perhaps the most fundamental difference between photography and other media. Nobody could paint or draw that manhole cover and later say they didn’t realize that the Ghost of Yesterday’s Stripe was visible. That, to me, is a principal part of the magic of candid photography.

[toto]

The people who replaced the manhole cover suffer from a lack of OCD.

[Alan Ramsey]

Sorry, Mike. I hate to disagree with you but that photo wins.

[PHILIP ERNBERGER]

I had to think about the manhole cover. Obviously if a worker replaced it, he would have lined it up better than that. So it has to result from motorists applying the brakes, and each time it rotates just a bit. If we new how much it moved, we would have a primitive traffic counter.

[Al DaValle]

Thanks for the HM. I enjoyed your take on the subject matter of Yellow.

[John Camp]

That's not a manhole cover with a grating. IMHO, it's a solid piece of iron or steel. I've seen grates in streets, but not on manhole covers. I say this because I have some experience with them (don't ask.) In fact, there are a wide variety of designs on manhole covers, some including the town's name, some designed by well-known artists. In the city of Chicago, thousands of manhole covers, some of which can weigh more than a hundred pounds, have gone missing in recent years, due to the demand for scrap iron and steel, mostly in China. So the yellow stripe is completely on solid steel. (Grates, by the way, are usually square or rectangular.)

[Michael Perini]

Re the Manhole cover: They are in fact solid covers with a ribbing pattern cast into them, they are not drains, they usually cover a vertical shaft which has a ladder for maintenance access . In New York some are tunnels for live steam which still heats some buildings, others are more mundane electrical tunnels , some with access to storm drains.
I've never seen a manhole cover that was also a drain, --but that doesn't mean that none exist somewhere.
The ribbon usually gets driven into the recesses by traffic. However not all yellow lines are thermoplastic, some are still sprayed on which would also paint the crevasses .

And yes this is too geeky for what is otherwise my favorite of the bunch.

[Ed G.]

I don't understand Matthew O'Brien's comment. The whole manhole cover is cast iron, it's not a grate. On the "ghost stripe", the paint has worn off the raised metal surfaces and remains only in the grooves.

A nice article about New York's manholes: https://hyperallergic.com/306273/the-well-trodden-art-of-the-manhole-cover-in-new-york-city/

[Another phil]

Re. the manhole, it is unlikely to be a grate, more likely to be indentations to provide a bit of grip for tyres, rather than flat metal which is very slippery when wet. The yellow paint is (as you say) a resin which arrives in blocks and is melted, poured into a "box" on wheels with a slot on the underside through which the resin flows.(I was a highways civ eng tech).

Longer lines are normally nowadays done with a vehicle which does all the above in one operation.

That's also why the original paint still shows in the indentations.

[Another phil]

P.S. the dark parts of the manhole are metal (look at the dark surround) and the paler radial bits are the indentations full of dust.

[david stock]

Thanks, Mike and Another Phil, for the votes of confidence. The yellow line was just that way. It had been very recently painted, which is what made it catch my eye. I have some later pictures of the same spot in later years, but they aren't as graphic.

[Edwin]

I agree that the resin "tape" could be thick enough to not flow through the space between the grates, but these yellow resins are very thick so that anything under the yellow, which by itself is "a light color" in nature, would not show through, like when the yellow is covering a dark asphalt patch next to a light concrete slab, there would be not change in the yellow as nothing is showing through. But here in this picture, the white of the grates are showing........

[Richard Parkin]

Another comment about comments. I did not realise until today that in Safari on iPad (iOS 11) that in landscape mode one is offered the choice of opening a link in split view, including a link to the page one is on. This is a neat solution to viewing the photographers comments alongside the sequence of pictures. If the iPad is rotated back and forth it switches between single page and split view.
Probably all the world but me knows this already :-(.

[longviewer]

Timing is everything - at work I saw a bright yellow '64 Ford Ranchero in the parking lot. Having just perused your fine image collection, it stood out even more than usual! No decent camera and too far away for a useful cell photo, but memorable.

[Randall Teasley]

I don't know how you do it Mike. The sequence of 13 yellow images seems just perfect.... but the idea of 13 rubber duck photos makes me chuckle every time I think about it. I can see why it took three days for you to get the idea out of your system.

[Marcelo Guarini]

The people who replaced the manhole cover should receive the "is not my job award".