'Flowers at the Edge of a Field'

Comments are up to date as of 1:44 p..m. ET Friday.

One of the side benefits of shooting with a sensor that's had its CFA removed is that every pixel records information. There's no color array that has to be interpolated. The resulting files don't just have detail; the detail is also somehow "clean," or crisp you might say.

This picture is for some unknown reason one of the most popular I posted on Flickr when I put up a bunch of pictures during the pandemic. It's gotten a lot of views. There's only one commenter, who says, "I'm amazed at what’s visible as I zoom in on the buildings in the distance. It’s as if the fictional CSI world of 'zoom and enhance' has finally come to be."

Plus, this is only a 24-MP sensor. Sigma also makes the same camera with a 61-MP sensor. That would be something with its CFA removed, wouldn't it? Although I can't imagine needing it. Plus, I actually reduced the size of this file before posting it on Flickr. I don't recall, now, why.

But many of the other pictures have the same amount of detail. The mystery is, why is this picture so popular? I mean, it's nice and all, and I like it okay, but I don't get what makes it nicer than some of the others.

Mike

P.S. I have a feeling of déjà vu again. Have I expressed my bemusement about Flowers at the Edge of a Field before? Maybe. I worry that I repeat myself. I worry that I repeat myself.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

darlene: "For me, 'Flowers at the Edge of a Field' captures a beautiful quality of light and exceptional tonality. It makes me feel as though I'm standing there, experiencing it firsthand. My eye is initially drawn to the barn's striking brightness, then travels across the field to the shimmering flowers among the grass. It's a truly beautiful experience."

MikeR (partial comment): "I believe that you did post that image before. But, so what? I've noticed the same as you the amazing detail, from my own monochrome camera. Pictures are especially striking when I print them from my recently converted monochrome printer. People just stare at the prints, drawn in by the never-ending detail."

Dave millier: "There is no absolute criteria for goodness in a photo, just what appeals to the individual viewer. There are a few principles or guidelines that, if followed, might help remove annoyances and help appeal aesthetically and emotionally, but there are no guarantees and the photographer has no control over the sensibilities of the viewer. The lighting on this one appeals to me but there isn't much composition-wise that excites me. If I'd shot it, I would probably have deleted it or ignored it. Which just proves my points. As you note, plenty of people have different taste to me. It's not truly possible to understand why something has mass appeal and attempts to explain it are confabulation."

Jeff Hohner: "I haven't looked through your Flickr extensively, but here's my take on the appeal of this pic.

1.) The lighting creates an extraordinary sense of depth. Depth in a photograph is always appealing because it's so hard to capture. Human vision excels at rendering depth. We perceive it as naturally as breathing, so when an image captures this experience we rejoice. Here is reality, not the flat, compressed rendering so typical of most photos, especially many landscapes that fail to capture real space.

2.) The flowers in the foreground accentuate the depth of the photo even further. They are small and adjacent to us, the viewer. They become a proxy for the viewer, for our humanity. They make us feel ourselves standing there at the side of the road, in the sun, in the weather, in the moment. Flowers are evocative symbols. In many cultures they have elaborate meanings, but broadly they represent beauty and the fleeting nature of life. Again, this makes us feel ourself, feel alive.

"I could go on about the many other strengths of the photo: texture, balance, strong one-point perspective, liveliness to the eye. But I think the photo's strong sense of being-in-place is what makes it most compelling. It's a lovely photo and a powerful one."

Mike replies: Thanks. A sense of space that gives the feeling of real volumes as I experience them has always been important for me. Not for me those real-estate photos in which super-wide-angle lenses make small rooms look vast, or the common trick of using long teles to flatten subjects into two-dimensional designs. (I mean not for me in my own work. I can appreciate things in the work of others that I wouldn't do myself.)

Jim Arthur: "Hi, Mike. I’m your lone Flickr commenter on 'Flowers at the Edge of a Field.' In addition to the CSI detail I mentioned, there is just something interesting about bright shafts of sunlight breaking through on a dark and gloomy day. I always stop to admire when that happens, even if I happen to be standing in a strip mall parking lot. This type of lighting effect seems to enhance the moment, as if you’re suddenly standing in a movie.

"It can also seem a bit mystical…kinda like a sun shower. Wikipedia lists all sorts of folkloric names for sun showers that have a common theme of tricksters like the devil or witches. In your picture, the impact of the moment is enhanced further by the detail and vast landscape. Another factor for me is how clean the air is. Here in the Sonoran Desert, there always seems to be dust and heat distortion in the distance.

"As for this picture's popularity, I think people view it because it’s well done, because of the lighting, because the technical details you provided are unusual and interesting and because the social media aspects of Flickr allow folks to direct their friends to see it."

Comments

[Stan B.]

You do repeat, as do I, as do we all- particularly as we get older... And I'm glad you did, since I don't recall that shot and it's well worth seeing (again)!

[Mark B]

“…only a 24-MP sensor.” Okay.

[Bruce Bordner]

I have over 17000 images at Flickr (always use album view) and all have been "viewed" - whatever that means. However, when I look at the daily stats I have no idea why that one and not the next....
My most popular image by far is titled "Panopticon Pussy". It's cute, at best. It's a cat with multiple eyes. Not my best work, but if it sells...
Every day someone looks at one of my early D800 test shots. Why? I have albums of what I consider to be printable work - not much action there. At least you get comments, but don't try to make sense of it. There's just so much good work, honestly.

[Dave]

Maybe it reminds people of Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico with the brightly lit buildings. :>)

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I have a big print of one of my photos, Minnehaha Falls in winter, up on my wall. The original of that, as I remember it, is 10 megapixels (if I'm off by one camera, then it's 12 instead; not enough difference to be worth checking).

The image measures 19.5 x 30 inches (paper is 24" by whatever).

I have never in my career had the capability to make prints this large myself, either in the darkroom or on inkjet (I can currently print up to 17" paper). I have rarely felt called to make such big prints, and I probably don't have all the habits locked in to get the very best resolution out of my cameras, either.

When I walk up to it and look closely, I can see that it's not perfectly sharp in its details, but in comparison to big-name prints I see in museums, it's still not bad at all. (Those are mostly older tech of course.) But it looks really good to me, it's one of my favorites (probably one of my top 2 color landscapes).

So yeah, our gear is "marvelously adequate". That's a wonderful thing.

One thing brilliant gear does, though, is take away most of our excuses. I'm less able than previously to say "The light was kind of dim" (with a straight face). And it makes our striving not in the technical areas so much as before. While there are clearly some people who are camera collectors who take pictures as a minor side hobby, I think there's another slice through the population where we we take pictures seriously, but are more comfortable with the technical challenges than the artistic ones. Many of us are people with absolutely zero training in the artistic side. (I have no training in photography on the tech side either, but various science courses form the basis for knowing what I'm doing, and for approaching delicate experiments.)

(The Minnehaha Falls print dates to a weekend of playing around back when Ctein got his first 44" color inkjet, so it presumably looks better than it would if I'd done the print on my own. There was probably some sophisticated noise reduction, in particular.)

[romano]

The photo Is very nice: to me, it expresses some kind of peace... Transforming the natural growth of flower into the human growth of houses and barns and whatever.

But... Just a comment: what about adding a photo *here*, not forcing people to follow a link? Maybe a reduced version that links on click to Flickr? Maybe this is related to the yesterday post... Why not having more *photos* into the blog...

Btw, I follow the blog through a RSS aggregator. Following the link means I have to go back through the "already read" list, or I have to wait to follow the link after I have read all the post, which is... Not optimal.

Whatever, thank you for keeping up the blog, which I find really interesting.

[Hi Romano, the problem is that the photos here are only 800 pixels wide, and the blogging software softens them somewhat, so they don't really show the detail very well. You can see the picture better at Flickr. At least on a computer you can. --Mike]

[Herman Krieger]

"Pushing up Daisies"

[MikeR]

I believe that you did post that image before. But, so what?

I've noticed the same as you the amazing detail, from my own monochrome camera. Pictures are especially striking when I print them from my recently converted monochrome printer. People just stare at the prints, drawn in by the never-ending detail.

Hey, since I will be vacationing in Keuka in mid August, if you'd like, send me an un-resized file of "Flowers" which I will print, and hand to you then.

[Harold McNamara]

Say that again.

[John Camp]

It's elegiac.

[J D Ramsey]

Although I agree with many of the other comments and the detail in the image (despite its reduced file size) has been previously mentioned, there is a feeling that you can continue to "walk into" the image with your eyes because each element of the composition has edge acuity and, therefore the ability to focus in no matter whether the element is near or far. That level of detail allows the eye to stay in the photo and go from place to place over time. It's not a photo you simply glance at and move on. You want to continue to view it.

[robert e]

I can't speak for anyone else, but it's an interesting image; for one thing, it's not a cliche scene, especially the weather and lighting, and also it's quiet. It's an image that whispers "hope", in the perhaps obvious sense of points of light in bleak weather reminding us of sunlight, but also in another sense by equating human constructions to flowers, as if to suggest that we can live in harmony with nature. (I feel like I've written similar things before about your work in this locale.) These aren't unique photographic themes, but they're being made in an unusually understated, almost take-it-or-leave-it way instead of being shoved in our faces.

I'm curious what the photographer was thinking and feeling at the time.

[Richard G]

I agree with Darlene; and Jeff Hohner. Stephen Shore in The Nature of Photographs showed an instance where something distant seemed closer than something far. That’s clever. The power of photography. But sometimes we don’t want clever, although there is an element of your photo uniting the very close and the very distant, along with the two commenters noting your gift to the viewer of them feeling they could be there. Recursion, you repeating yourself, can be comforting in art. There is some comfort in this photo immediately pleasing the viewer., recalling similar pleasure in other selectively sunlit scenes.

[Richard Tugwell]

I've never used Flickr, but I did a search in their forums. It appears that the view count doesn't mean that someone has "viewed" your imgae, or even that they have seen it. It seems to increment the count for all sorts of reasons (activity feeds etc). Of course it benefits social media companies for their users to think that they are attracting attention.

Here's a for example - https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157719475871293/#:~:text=Now%2C%20a%20%22view%22%20as,photo%20appeared%20on%20someone's%20screen.

[Bear.]

Sorry, does nothing for me at all. But what’s it like printed?

[Bob G.]

Maybe a literal example of “Rule of Thirds”? :)

[Kenneth Tanaka]

Your image echoes a bit of Andreas Gursky’s “Rhein II”, which is an enormous print. (And a heavily edited image.). I”ve often thought that viewers faced with large event-less interstitial spaces in images subconsciously fill-in the blanks and take away the resulting impression in their memory.

[Dan D]

Interesting how clear those far buildings are. I can't even see that well if I was standing where that photo was taken.

[Bob Johnston]

I think that it may be that people find it relatable. Epic scenes of epic landscapes in epic light have perhaps become clichéd.

[Arg]

"The resulting files don't just have detail; the detail is also somehow "clean," or crisp you might say." -yes, that is a good summary of how I feel about this Foveon sensor photo (also no CFA) that I took some years ago: https://flic.kr/p/NcvXmH I hope you see it as I see it. cheers

[V.I. Voltz]

You put a similar, beautiful photo of a field of corn in Photo Techniques when you reviewed the Contax Aria. It was on Kodak Plus-X with a yellow filter, and taken with the 50mm Planar. In that photo, two thirds of the photo was corn, a third or less sky. Layers that divide the frame up. It’s was beautiful too.

Approaching 50, this is the sort of thing my brain is full of.

Voltz

[Good memory, wow. That was one of the very first prints I made in my very first darkroom, under the basement stairs at my father's house in Bethesda. Printed on Kodak medalist. But taken with a Contax 139Q, a precursor of the Aria. <—you'll notice that's still in my brain. :-) --Mike]

[Jeff1000]

The first thing I notice when I look at your photograph is that it seems to be hastily composed: the flowers at the edge of the field are tilted up, from left to right. I wonder if this was intentional to create an artsier more casual feel? As a result, the landscape, in the background, seems to be tilted as well, but it might not be. Other than the apparent legerdemain in the foreground, it seems to be a lovely but rather ordinary landscape. The rigged sensor in your camera doesn't seem to add anything above and beyond what could be accomplished with a plebeian color sensor converted to black and white. I like the photograph though.