I'll expand on my previous critique of what Len sometimes calls -- in his uniquely challenged manner -- his "photography photos."
Good critique. And since technical stuff probably goes way above Len's head, here's my Awesome 3-Step Amateur Photography Self-Improvement Tutorial:
1) Does the photograph look like shit?
2) If it does, is it your fault or the fault of the equipment? Note that failing to understand your equipment is kind of both.
3) Try not to do that. And if it looks like you can't polish the turd enough, just try not to publish the photo and market it as a shining example of your work. Because that's dumb, isn't it?
(3) His post-production editing is essentially nonexistent. ... It's quite possible that his photos are not edited at all. What comes out of the camera is most likely what he serves up on the Internet.
Should note that there's nothing wrong with light or nonexistent postproduction
as such - people took awesome photos before Photoshop, dammit. Of course, light postproduction will first require that the stuff straight out of camera is passable at all. As said, can't polish a turd.
(4) I strongly suspect that this "professional photographer" keeps his camera set at all times in either fully automatic mode or some "scene" mode like landscape, night, snow or whatever. In shots with wide exposure values, Len never sets his exposure to capture the highlights or the shadow detail. Instead, what we see are blown-out highlights and no shadow details. He never seems to use aperture priority in order to limit his depth of field to the main subject of an image; he let's the camera decide those pesky details for him.
I have FxIF installed so I often take a peek at Len's metadata. He seems to be using presets pretty often. I think he used aperture priority in some photos - not that it made them look any better.
Anyway, a simple explanation for the dumb who walk amongst us:
Full-automatics are nice
when they work. You'll will easily find out that that automatics tend to screw you over a number of ways, particularly if you're not trying to photograph mostly lit stuff in broad daylight. Getting both light and shadow right is tricky, and automatics generally tell you to go fuck yourself after sunset.
He never makes any attempt to edit out purple fringing in areas where his blown-out highlights come in contact with darker objects.
The colour aberration made me think that he has some cheap-ass optics, too. My memory from looking at the metadata is hazy but I think he had at least few lenses - dunno about
him, but results like this would make me wonder what the hell I'm wasting money on.
Oh, and one of my favourite moment of the threads was when his mother supposedly told him that the airshow photos were indistinguishable from WW2 era photos.
They looked shopped.
Can tell from some of the pixels and having seen a lot of actual WW2 photos.
Brianna Wu and her supporters are cancer. Please don't take any actions that could possibly put us on their radar.
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
This tale takes us back to
a town called Crush.
Everyone thought, "hey, we should head down to Texas for this glorious event. What do you say? It'll be fun! Hope they'll sell popcorn!"
(Or whatever the hell people ate in ye olde days of 1890s)
And so they went.
What did everyone actually get?
"Oh god there are flying train parts everyone WHERE DID ALL THIS BLOOD COME FROM"
...and this is why getting Wu involved would
not be fun.
