[matthew]

A couple of days ago I went back to the neighbourhood where I grew up. My apartment complex now has a donut shop instead of an ornamental garden in front of it, but the playground that I spent so much time on was essentially intact. Some of the bold colours had been painted over with black rust paint, the swings were missing, and there was a general sense of neglect -- but this equipment wasn't new when I first found it three decades ago.

Swings:







Slide:





The processing is all done within lightroom, and is accomplished by pushing most of the sliders mostly the wrong way. Obviously I'm not looking for detailed critiques, but I am curious about what sort of a reaction they get. I can't separate myself from the subject.

[Keith Alan]

I like your approach to the subject matter.
Composition is exceptional.

The processing is a little much in my opinion--once there are halos and other weird artifacts created (especially along the chain in #3) then I think you run the risk of distracting and thereby losing the viewer.

You want them to fall into the scene.
I keep hitting the screen--my eyes can't leave the strange parts, so my heart isn't engaging in the experience. (As a photographer I'm sure that I'll be more sensitive to these things than the general public).

And I know you like little details, but I would lose the plane and especially the wires.
I guess you would need to open Photoshop to do that.

It's an interesting look, in the first three.
I just think they are too Extreme Playground-- make them a little more like the slide photos which are terrific all around.

[Irma]

I like very much your treatment with colors Matt. Some of your pictures look as if they were HDR. You probably had a lot of information in your pictures to work so well with the colors.

#1 has a very interesting effect. It looks like shiny metal with blue color and still it is a bit different from the blue of the sky. I wonder if the blue of the tube was originally blue, so then you did a great job separating the blue of the sky and the blue of the tube.... However I see a little halo between the sky and the metal. Maybe the treatment there was a bit hard? Nothing you can't correct in PS. The effect you got just with LR was really amazing.

I admire too much #4 and I like it a lot the metal step, it looks fantastic!! I really love it. But I also have my doubts about the blue snow. You know I wouldn't mind, but some people like to see it white....

I see this treatment as a kind of posterize effect but still very rich in detail and shades of color. Of course a very nice effect for artistic photography giving priority to color, lines and forms.

All in all they are great pictures with beautiful color treatment..

[matthew]

Thanks very much for your reactions. The original photos were quite bland and lacked interest, so they needed at least a little something. Some got more of it than others.

It's hard to get a good idea of what these photos are going to look like on the web. Keith, most of the noise around the chain is from the conversion to sRGB, but the haloing around every other solid object is from the processing. I did push the swing set really hard, but I was never looking for realism since the realistic photos were bad to begin with. And you know me very well -- I shot to specifically include the power lines, and the plane was also intentional.

Irma, the colours aren't shifted, but the way the vibrance and saturation has been changed emphasizes the subtle differences. The slide photos haven't been pushed nearly as hard as the other three, but I still find the effect far too artificial to pass for a 'photograph'. But I'm pretty sure I can correct the blue of the snow with a white balance shift without affecting the slide colours.

[Wedding Shooter]

I love the first slide picture Matt - I find the halos on the first couple a bit distracting.

[Toad]

These shots obviously deserve more than just the cursory comment I have time for today - I will comment in more depth later - but well done!

[NT73]

The slide steps and the footprints look like............. "A small step for man, but a giant leap for mankind" ........ in colour.

[Toad]

Ok - back.

#1 is great - the processing gives it a look a liquid gel look, and I like how the flare of the sun adds a gradient to the sky. Maybe the power lines should be removed though as I don't think they enhance the composition.

#2 is much the same technique, but I feel #1 says it better. I like the airplane in #2 though...

#3 is starting to get an ink outlines appearance here because the key line if so black and distinct - almost toon shaded. It would work better IMO if the focus were a bit crisper. I like the composition of this one the best of the 1st 3.

[wulinka]

Sorry to be so late on this.
I love your series Matthew, and I think your processing is going the right way. The extreme look suits the subject matter.

Some of the holos and edges that Keith also observed seem to stem from you jpeg conversion and downsizing pictures for upload, there is particularly ovbvious pixelation in No. 3, but I think you can avoid getting these in larger res pictures.

I like metal and corrosion and color combinations like you used, and the snow in teh last one complements the metal well.
Very well done I love it.

Uli

[Don Schaeffer]

It's great poster material, needs to printed large.

[Keith Alan]

#3 was the one that bothered me most--now that I've looked at the properties (thanks to Uli) I see that it's only 24kb.
Would like to see another jpg that's got more bits and less jpg compression.

It's very interesting to me seeing your interpretation of playgrounds.
There is a definite wink towards mine with the swings, but I think that's unavoidable since looking up at the top bar is just what you did as a kid.
And between the color treatment and the snow and the lack of chains, there's no outward similarities between our series.

Mine is still incomplete--there's a huge playground we used to visit on special occasions that I need to shoot. Haven't been there since 1969 or so.

[matthew]

Thanks for the great feedback, everyone. I'm finally settling back in and have had another chance to look at the original files.

First of all, these have suffered quite a bit in the conversion to small sRGB images. Plenty of halos and artifacts are visible in the originals, but the gradation is generally smoother than what these show. And it's interesting that #3 is only 24KB -- the one I uploaded was 96KB when it was on my hard drive. Someone's doing some compression without telling me, so I guess it's time to find a new host. Here's a sample of the original #3, at 100% magnification, compressed to 41KB from the initial 124 courtesy of Photobucket:



Here's a slightly mellower remix of the photo, getting a lot of the look that I like without pushing everything quite so hard (again, compressed to 30% of what I wanted):



I haven't been brave enough to try printing one of these. It's worth a shot -- I do have a print competition coming up for my club...

When I was here I only had my ultra-wide, which worked well for recreating some of the childhood size, but it was really limiting in other ways. Next time I'm going to pack a telephoto and some wireless flashes. And snow pants.