Episode three. What's happening?

Welcome to the podcast, Martin. Do you know what is the one true thing that binds us in time and space?

Oh, that's a very deep question. Is it our shared basis in carbon, or is it something about string theory or. I don't know. Is it the force? What is it?

It's the three by two photo cast. That's it.

Oh, it's this show. We've been elevated to that level. All right.

Yep.

Wow. For sure we were that important.

Yeah. You're like, morning, afternoon time. Right now I'm evening. But the one true thing that binds us together. Three by 02:00 so here we are.

Cool.

For episode three of the three by two photo cast. Welcome back, everyone. We're going to do surprise. The same format as we always do. Slight tweaks. We usually do. Martin me. Martin.

Me.

Martin. Me. We're going to flip that. I'm going to go first, so I'm going to jump right in to the first photo. First photo today is by Phil, and it is titled walking on Fifth Avenue, New York. So already you know that it's New York. It's going to be iconic. You open up the photo, and, holy crap, I saw this, and I just stared at it for a while. It was mesmerizing, I'll say, in the sense that, hey, it's black and white, first of all. So any black and white image, I feel like already is just like, oh, I gotta find something in here. This just. I'm already intrigued. But the tones and the contrast is super heavy. It's got this, like, smoky, misty New York vibe of the steam coming out of the sewers and so forth against the buildings that you've got new buildings, you've got old buildings all in one frame. And then smack in the center bottom is this silhouette of a person holding an umbrella. It's almost pure black. The umbrella has a little bit of color to it. Well, not color in the sense of color, because it's black and white, but you can see a little bit of contrast there on the umbrella. But the person's almost completely just gone in blacks. And then there's another umbrella off to the right. But that one person in the center is. Is really the focal point here. But it's almost hard to focus on because of everything else going on because of the steam and the. And the moodiness of it and the buildings. It's. I just love looking at it, and it just. It could easily be. Again, I think I say this all the time, but it's like, this could be a still from a film. I just feel like that's what I'm feeling here. What are your thoughts here?

I agree with everything you said. I love the stark contrast of this. And the mist is very, very cool, or the steam or whatever it is. For those who have just joined the show, listening for the first time, if you're wondering where on earth this photo is, check the show notes, because this is really like the audio commentary, isn't it, Jason, of visual media?

Yeah, good point.

Otherwise, just imagine it and stuff you saw. Who cares? Yeah, you can't see it. Yeah. This, this image is pretty cool. I mean, I've seen Phil's photos on glass before. I think they pretty much all are cool. Something that stood out to me in this photo was kind of the old and new of the buildings. And I think you're going to have this in lots of cities around the world now. And I think about Sydney, particularly being in Australia. Sydney and New York are not terribly similar, but they share that kind of urban thing where you've got all of these really classic old buildings, like the one you can kind of see in the foreground with all of those really intricate details around the windows and what looks like kind of stonework. And then as you go back, you can see more kind of rigid modern designs, like that kind of heavy black front, and then what appears to be like a glass building in the background. So you could kind of look at this photo and you've got these different historical points or architectural styles in there. So as time goes on, it can be kind of hard to place, is what I'm getting at. So I think what's cool about this photo is that you don't have any real idea of the people, you know, who they are in the foreground, like you said, with those silhouettes. And the building is a kind of a hodgepodge. That's the kind of modern city. So it just kind of lends to the mystery of the photo, I suppose.

I actually didn't realize that. But now that you mentioned it, I feel like going from left to right. It's going from old to new, almost, because you have that ornate building on the left, kind of a very standard umbrella with that first person moving across. You have this other person with an umbrella, which is more, call it clearish or something, where it just feels like not something standard from the past, new buildings and then new bus stop, which is not something you would have seen, you feel like in front of the building on the left. So it just gives this, like, passage of time almost left to right.

Yeah.

Just really cool.

Yeah. And I don't know if Phil meant it this way or if it's something that happens when you capture a city now, but you go to cities now, and everything's so global. Like, who are you? What is it? What is this place? It's not so local or regional anymore. It's for so many different people. So cool photo. Thank you, Phil.

Yeah. Thank you, Phil.

All right, should we go to my first one?

Yeah. What do you got first?

Okay, so, moving along, I have a photo also on glass from Mark, and the caption that goes with it is an elephant cow and her young calf enjoying a mud bath in. Now, I may be mispronouncing this chobe or Kobe National park taken with an Om system, om one, and 150 to 400 telephoto, or super telephoto lens. Basically, what you see in this photo is, as the caption says, this elephant mother running alongside a very muddy calf with just dirt and mud and water just spraying everywhere. And what stood out to me about this photo, other than the fact that I like wildlife images, is the texture of it. I mean, it's this perfectly captured, high, super fast, shutter speed image of these two elephants having fun. And just the texture of the skin, the light reflecting off the perfect kind of mud splatter. I just think Mark has done a fantastic job capturing this photo, and it made me smile. It's just very cute. Yeah.

This is when I. So anybody that doesn't know, we put these in, into a note shortly before we start recording the show. So we don't have a ton of view time. But when I pop this open, instant smile, this just feels like the kind of photo that you've always wanted to be able to take yourself, whether you're a child or an adult. It's just. It's just fun. Everything about it. We have these elephants. They're clearly having a good time. They're muddy as all heck, which, who doesn't want to be just muddy and dirty all the time? But, yeah, I appreciate the one 2000th of a second, because it just. Everything is just frozen, but it just kind of gives you that kind, like you're there almost, and you're able to capture what's happening because you've got the mud flinging up, which has a cool texture, the skin of the elephant, another cool texture. The color on this thing is great, even though everything is basically brown, with some exceptions of some grass and so forth. But the different variations and tonalities of the brown is just super cool. And I love the baby one because it just. There is an absolute sense of joy coming from that baby elephant just being completely trunk to tail, covered in mud. It is the. The dirtiest elephant you could possibly be. And that just screams fun. Everything about this is just really great.

Yeah, it kind of depresses me a bit that I wasn't there to actually take the photo, because I see things like this, and I'm like, because we have lots of beautiful birds around where I live. You know, there's always some color or screeching going on outside, but I don't have elephants running past my house or no muddy waterways where you could find an animal of this size. So, Mark, I'm a little bit jealous, but I'm glad that you've, you know, provided the photo for our enjoyment here.

It definitely makes me wonder what the scenario was here. Was this like a safari kind of situation or what? Cause it. It's 150 to 400 mil, but it's at. Oh, but it's an om, so it's actually 300. Okay, so it's 300 mil. Got it. So it was pretty far away.

I'm pretty sure that one, that's a pro level lens. It's like their only kind of creamy white finish one. And I think that has a 1.4 or 1.5 times built in teleconverter, so.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, it's a. It's a pretty serious lens. So Mark is not mucking around here. Yeah.

But still, f 56. Unable to get 2000th of a second and get it. This is just great. Really, really nice, Mark.

Cool. What's your next one, Jason?

Next. The next one is from Roman on glass as well. It's titled UAP return to form. And they have categorized it as abstract, minimal water. I was a little bit speechless when I first saw this because I was trying to process what was happening. Here it is a sunset photo, which we've all seen a million sunset photos. You know, we have them every day, so there's lots of opportunity. But this was one of those times where it's a very common subject done in a different way. That is very interesting. And when you look at it, you have your horizon line of, I'm assuming the ocean, I'm not sure, but then you have the sun, which is also then stretched across. It's as if it was a quick movement, um, horizontally while taking the photo to get this kind of stretched effect, because the water is very soft and. And stretched out. And the sun is this perfect. It looks like a lozenge from, like, a software application, almost. Yeah. Where it is just this perfect line all the way across, perfectly rounded edges on it, and it just. It almost doesn't feel real. It feels like you just took, you know, like a paint tool and just went right across the frame. But this was all done, you know, in camera, so it just. It's just a very cool photo. It also gives me vibes of, like some kind of star wars off planet kind of. This is what the sun looks like there. Some have two suns. This one just has a weird, long sun for some reason. So it gives you that kind of space feel of otherworldliness. And again, it's just super cool to see something so common, but in such a different way.

Yeah, kind of like, as you said, the lozenge thing for an application, it's like, I don't know whether Roman was on a train or a bus or a passenger in a car or whatever, but somehow managed to hold it stable and follow the apple human interface guidelines in warping or stretching the sun. Pixel perfect. Well done, Roman. But, yeah, almost like, like you said, with Star wars, it's like when they enter hyperdrive or hyperspace and you're always looking directly, like, straight ahead through, let's say, the cockpit of the millennium Falcon or something, and everything stretches and warps past you, but it's almost like. Like someone bothered to turn their head and look out the side and see the stars stretching that way. So. Yeah, yeah, good one. It's. It is different. It's just a different spin on it. And even if this were just the gradient, I think I'd be happy, to be honest. It's like, it just has extra bits.

It is a very pleasing gradient, that's for sure. And it's. It's the outtake where somebody looked out the side window, like you said, where everybody looked forward and somebody said, oh, what's out there? Oh, it's the sun going. Stretched. So, yeah, just, uh, really great. It would, it would make a great wallpaper, I can tell you that.

Yeah. Maybe I should try similar things. I'm just looking at it now. Anyway. You have to wait. It is. I mean, as we're recording, it's golden hour on glass this month. That is the, like, monthly category. So things like this. A bit of inspiration to go out, I think. Yeah. This, looking at the metadata, this, uh, this photo was taken before that, but good inspiration for anyone who's on the network and looking for stuff like that. Totally nice addition, Jason. Now, this one. I'm stepping outside of glass for a little bit to go to a I believe yes, it's a microdot blog site, but this person is also, I think, an OMG lol user. I might be incorrect or omgalol for anyone who knows about that service from our recording with Andrew on hemispheric views talking about Atom service, but this is by Apple Annie and this is actually more of a blog post, series or category that she has going and there were just two particular images, but I want to focus on the first one in this and it's a series of garden updates that she's doing and I just thought this was really nice. I know that we've kind of concentrated mainly on photos that come from services like Glass or show a lot of that exif data and we're talking about like, you know, composition and maybe gear and that sort of thing entwined in the conversation. But for anyone who's just listening and can't see it right now, the caption that goes with this is just a couple of shots of the back garden this morning. I love this spring to summer transition when everything is still spring fresh, but also starting to pop off. And I don't know if Annie's just taken this with her phone or a different camera, it doesn't really matter. This first portrait image of her back garden I just think is absolutely gorgeous. You've got everything really nicely in focus, which might not be to everyone's taste. You know, generally when you see people sharing on networks and stuff, maybe they try to shoot wide open and get this kind of extreme shallow depth of field happening with, you know, macro flowers in the foreground or something. This is just someone's really beautiful photo of their back garden taken in portrait, leading your eyes all the way back up to what appears to be this awesome tree covered in vines or creeping something. I'm not sure what it is, but yeah, gorgeous flowers in the foreground. This kind of rock garden with stepping stones to a lawn and yeah, I just think it's really nice to be able to browse something like microdot blog and see people's everyday in this way. Something that gives her happiness or pride in her own. In her own home.

Yeah, this is great. Other than being super jealous looking at my own backyard and now feeling inadequate in my own backyard abilities, it's gorgeous. I really love how it leads you, like you said, all the way through from front to back. You immediately start at the front because there's a bunch of beautiful flowers and then you have this wonderful pathway that you're walking up to, again, a beautiful lawn. And then I get stuck on that tree. You mentioned that it's just engulfed in vines or some kind of other thing is growing on this other tree. And it's. It's pretty remarkable. And, I mean, you know, no big deal, but the sky is absolutely beautifully perfect with blue, with just sparse clouds. Yeah, it's just. It's. It's a lovely scene and it's a place that you want to be. And I think, like, I think you've mentioned a little bit there, too, is like, it's an everyday thing that I think we would often just not pay attention to. You would just probably pass by like it's a yard. But look, having it here in front of you to look at, it's incredible and just so peaceful and just nice. It just gives you a good feeling overall. And I think too often we walk by stuff like this because it's quote unquote not interesting or not somehow remarkable or whatever. But I think you can find beauty in different places, and this is definitely a good example of that.

Yeah. I get so much joy from visiting the nearby Wollongong botanic garden. And you go through a place like that and you go, oh, this is nature. Right? But it's also very controlled. It's curated. And I feel like this is this beautiful pocket of nature in Annie's backyard and kind of like what I was saying with the everyday thing, like, you can tell that Annie knows how to take a photo. She's composed this well. We have that kind of line leading through, like you said, in those layers as we discover the garden. But it doesn't feel pretentious. I don't look at this and go, oh, this was taken for a real estate website or magazine or brochure. It's just a nice image. So well done, Annie.

All right, my final three of the three by two is from Allison, and it is called shadow study. It is, as it says in the title, it is a shadow study. It is a top down of. You have to kind of count for a second to make sure you're understanding just how many there are. But it is indeed like two bottles, but it has light sources coming at it horizontally from a number of different angles, giving you this illusion of shadow of two more of each bottle. So there's sort of six in the scene because of the way that the light is coming in. And it's just like, it's a cool optical illusion. It looks black and white at first, but the glasses do have a dark green tint to them. So there is some color there, but just barely. And I just absolutely love the fact that there is all these angles of light, which is already exciting to go through these bottles, but then also what they're sitting on. You get this great fabric texture behind, which does nothing to the two actual bottles, but kind of changes everything about the reflections of the bottles on the fabric. So you have two very stark glass bottles. Then you have these super ultra textured ones because of the fabric they're on. The tones and the shadows and the light all play together just so well that I. Yeah, I had, well, obviously I picked it, but I just find it to be kind of mesmerizing because it's. Is it two bottles? Is it four? Is it six? What, what exactly is going on here? It just, it gives you pause and makes you have to think about it. And I think part of neat photos oftentimes are they make you think, yeah.

I'm glad you put this one in because, and I'm gonna, assuming, let's say, that Alison happens to listen to this podcast, I'm gonna address her personally. Now, Alison, if you are listening, you broke my brain with this photo. And I say that because when, Jason, when you put your links in, I don't know how you approach it, but when you put your links into our shared note before we record, I follow the link, and I deliberately just look at the photo without reading the accompanying caption because in this case, Alison's actually said, oh, I wasn't completely satisfied with an element of this, the depth of field. And I don't want that to kind of ruin or frame what I'm going to think of the photo. And when I landed on this, I opened it and my eyes instantly went to the two shadows of the bottles that are going diagonally up to the right. Those two darker ones. Right. And that's what my eyes, the texture that you were just explaining really nicely. And I thought, is this a painting? So then I looked at it and went, I have no idea what I'm looking at. And then as I actually kind of blinked and looked away for a second and went back, I went, oh, they're actually coming out towards you. It's those two bottles. Like, it's an over the top. It's an aerial view. I had the completely incorrect interpretation of what the hell was going on in this image. So, Alison, whether you intended it as a kind of illusion or something to kind of warp people's minds a bit, I don't know. But you did a number on me, and I think it's fantastic. So, yeah, just really nicely done. And also, you know, when you do look at the caption and she said, I hope you don't mind if I quote here, not completely satisfied with where the depth of field fell in this, but looking forward to exploring this idea further when the sun starts bouncing around in my studio again. You know what I mean? Like, this isn't what she intended, but I think it's fantastic. And if you don't worry about that, you just come at it as a viewer. You kind of discover or interpret it differently. So, yeah, I honestly thought this was a painting going in the completely different direction.

Very cool. I'm actually glad you said that because those were the first two I saw as well, when I first saw this, the two starting in the middle, heading diagonally to the upper right. And I thought it was like an MC Escher kind of painting thing going on or something, where it was like, how is like, that's the weirdest angle. And then only until you see the real quote unquote bottles, then you go, oh, okay, I see what's going on here. So, yeah, good. Just super cool.

But the whole thing about leading lines, like we spoke about with the garden in Annie's photo just a bit earlier, and I think sometimes we say or I read things online, whether it's on glass or other sites that we tend to favor, and you see things like, oh, fantastic composition, blah, blah, blah. Something about leading line, you go, okay, maybe we're getting a bit pretentious here, but this is an example of where I opened it and my eye was instantly guided in a certain direction based on how it was composed. And we might kind of take that for granted, or think it's a bit over the top when it comes to something like, I don't know, a line in a landscape or something architectural, because we go, well, that's the way it was designed, or that's the way it's formed. Like, you just went up and composed it well enough and took a photo or something. But this is kind of deliberate and it guided at least my brain and my eyes in a different direction. So I think we shouldn't take for granted those things that people might think are a bit cliched. It does actually really affect the way that you interpret the photo. And had she rotated this and had it in portrait, we might have seen it differently again. So important points in photography, I think.

Yeah, good points. Alrighty, you're three by two. Go ahead.

This is my last photo. For this episode, it's by Les Moulder. I'm a fan of his photos on glass. I'll be honest. He's also on the east coast of Australia, but he's north from me. He's a bit of a drive away. And this image is called scarecrow, with the added detail. Finally, a use for a business suit. Now, this is a widescreen kind of. This is a. This is a wider crop of a beautiful golden hour photo going with that monthly category on glass that I mentioned, that they're running at the moment. And, you know, down the bottom left in the foreground, you can see this shadowy figure, which is the scarecrow that he's talking about. And then along the bottom of the photo, you can see these kind of. You assume it's part of the. The crops, like the plants that he's growing, or kind of these hedges or bushes with these kind of sticks or plants coming out of it. I'm not on his farm. I'm not sure exactly what it is. But you can kind of see the crops running horizontally, parallel with the bottom of the photo. And it leads your eyes to these gorgeous tall trees with just this golden light pouring through with fog in the background over the hills. And I just thought, this is beautifully taken. It's a great use of the crop. You know, the fact that the scarecrow, which is the subject, at least in name of the photo, is kind of shrouded in darkness makes it look kind of menacing or foreboding or mysterious, and lets the light to the far right of the photo kind of be the star of it. But then you've got the added feature of the fog, which is cool as well. So, I don't know, this just seems like a perfect moment in time captured naturally on his farm. And I think it's great.

Yeah, very cool. The orange of the sun that then has a gradient into the pink, purple fog on the left. So cool. That color combination is just phenomenal. The little tiny grouping of trees to the one side versus the left side, I think, is super cool. Very asymmetrical. Where it's not just trees all the way across, it's just here are trees here, and then only fog on the left. It gives this nice center line of difference between the two sides and that the scarecrow is on the one side but not the other, because they only have one. I also. I do like that there are no birds in this photo.

Oh, yeah.

Because I think there's always kind of the scarecrow with a bird on its shoulder, which is funny, but I love that there just are no birds, and the scarecrow is doing its job, so that's really cool as well.

Mm.

The way the lighting is from the sun is it's somehow, at the same time, super harsh, but also soft.

Yeah.

And I don't know if I'm explaining that well, but it just feels like the intensity of that sun is so strong, but in the overall image, it feels like it's just softened throughout the entire image. So I don't know if that's just because of the way the photo is or what, but it just has a really nice feeling that it feels like it could be easily blown out, but also just very uniform across the entire photo, which I think is very cool. And it goes from, again, super bright on the right to a darker kind of shroudedness, like you said, with the scarecrow, where the scarecrow is almost in darkness. And I think that's very interesting, where you have this sort of left side of the photo as nighttime and right side of the photo as daytime. So there's this sort of 24 hours period almost within one photo. Yeah. So just really, really cool. And I love the caption there of finally a use for a business suit. I fully agree with that 100%.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of suits either. And look, two more points I want to make about this photo. First of all, what you were saying about light. Les obviously knows how to approach or deal with light in his photos because I think this is gorgeous. But it's kind of, you know, like when you look at the most gorgeous sunsets and you can see not only the orange or yellow, but hues of pink or purple. Like, you can see how light is being refracted differently or interacting with the atmosphere. It's like all of that magic is happening on ground level. You look at that top left and you can see blue sky. You can kind of see it away from the sunset. And then all of the characteristics of a perfect sunset are on the ground, going from that yellowy orange all the way to that far left, where you can see that pinky purpleness in the fog. So it's like a sunset has been brought down on the ground and the blue sky is still kind of above. So it's kind of strange. I think there's just lots of interesting points to this photo and then kind of going full circle with that point that we're making with your first photo in New York. This is a totally different image, but it speaks to the kind of timelessness of nature because when you look at the metadata of this photo, it was taken on the 11 June 2013. Oh, it was taken eleven years ago. Like it's from his archives, but published recently as part of this golden hour category. So we started talking about the kind of mystery of time around urban architecture, and now we've kind of seen the cycles of nature or time now with something from eleven years ago. And I didn't obviously, realize that when I first looked at the image. You have to look at the caption to get that.

Yeah. And is that scarecrow still there? We don't know.

Who knows?

I have to imagine this would be a really difficult photo to take as well because of the stark contrast of light and dark. Yeah, I don't feel like you would just take a quick photo and this would be there. It feels like you would have to really work at getting your exposure correct to be able to pull, to not blow out that right side and not just have that left side in pitch blackness like that. This feels technically like it would be not super easy to capture. So. Yeah. Well done, Les.

All right, well, there you go. Six photos, three by two. All done.

That's it. Three for me, three for you times two. That's a wrap. Thanks, everybody, for listening to three by two photocast for June, and we'll see you in July.

See you next time. Toodles.