And the background plants share, as observers, in the overall imputed person hood of our foreground pair. Image #3 recognizes their participation without getting into their personal space as #4 would tend to suggest.

As a former physicist, I have to appreciate your seeing particle tracks here, complete with trajectories of sub-particles cast aside.

I did make some photographs as you suggest, with blurred foreground as well as background, but none of such suggestive subjects. In fact, I didn’t think of the allusion to human figures until working with the images on the computer.

Good provocative post!

I, too, go for #3. I have my reasons for so thinking, but I’m having a hard time explaining. Maybe it has something to do with Cartier-Bresson. Everything in his photographs is both in optical and topical focus. Your #3 sacrifices a little background specificity to better emphasize the foreground interaction, and I can accept that. #4 tends to bury the foreground in a sea of information.

There is something here that reminds me of the business end of the Tevatron, or a diagram of particle interactions where there is a defined event among almosts.

I remember an exhibit of photographs in which the artist had gone out in the brush with the ability to select focal planes. Foregrounds were sometimes blurry with something rather far-off being crisp. It appeared that he could tilt his lens relative to the film or sensor plane as focus often took off at angles. All this to wonder how your loving saplings would appear if in a kind of pool of focus, sandwiched between relatively blurred fore- and backgrounds. They seem to be having a private moment together which might better be spied-upon than frontally confronted.

I was just thinking about my response to D. and deciding for #3 myself, though that’s provisional. When I have a choice, I often like to live with a picture and see how well it lasts. “Tension” is a good word, although I was thinking to myself in terms of “balance” of foreground and background. But there is a push-pull operating there that I would like to be more dynamic than static. As Birgit, says, #4 feels too obstructing. #1 has, I suspect, a more immediate appeal for most people, including me, but then I rather quickly start thinking of it as cliché; it’s prettier, but doesn’t hold my interest as long.

You’re quite right to bring up time and linearity and the contrast between reading and viewing, story and scene. I think I agree with you about #3 precisely because it does introduce enough of a movement between foreground and background to develop a bit of story, rather than being everything-all-at-once like #4 (I exaggerate a bit) or only-the-central-subject like #1.

Birgit,

I believe you’re right about the white spots; all images had the same processing, but the exposures must have been slightly different. But what’s more noticeable to me–now that you prompt me to examine closely–is that the water droplets on the left are much more prominent in #1, as they don’t have to compete with other background detail as in #4.

D.,

Though I’d go with #3 if I were to print one right now, I actually like all of them, and in fact I like them more the more I look at them (though I’m not claiming any is a great photograph). If I were to choose one for a book or a show, it would depend on what else would accompany it.

I really don’t like one better than the others. Which one do you prefer?

The way that I presently feel, I enjoy the twins in figure 1, with their happy bending towards one another, exchanging pleasantries.

Figure 4, makes me I sigh because it seems like a lot of work to make my way through all that brush.

Thus, at the moment Figure 4 makes me feel bad while Figure 1 gives me joy. I will look at the pictures again when I feel less burned out to determine whether my likings are subject to the way I feel.

It is odd that the white pimples on the twins are much more prominent in 4 than in 1. Is the perception of an apparent higher contrast in 4 a feature of the visual system?