Well you've got a high standard. I've looked extensively through your flickr gallery and a lot of it is really great work. It's the combination of interesting, abstract/street photography subject matter and gritty style. You seemed to hit a bit of a slump, where all the grittiness was still there, but the subjects were unremarkable (or at least shot in an unremarkable way). I think we all wrestle with our senses of photographic prescience when we're in slumps like that. You get ready to take the shot, and you know in the back of your mind that it's not going to be all that amazing, but something compels you to trip the shutter anyway. And then...what do you know...unremarkable results. But I think you're making your way back to getting the subjects under control. As for this image, though, it makes me feel, in part, a little bit like you're trying to make your way back there by being extra-gritty. Granted, the white stuff adds a really interesting textural element (almost looks like reticulation). But at the same time it's competing for attention with the subjects. Perhaps I'm totally off base here. I mean I'm really only going off of this most recent shot. But what I'm sensing is that perhaps you'd look at a clean version of the shot and decide that it wasn't on par with the grittiness in a lot of your other shots. That's not a bad thing. The fact that you might do this sort of crude post-processing at all is very cool. I suppose I'm just saying that you ought to be careful about it. I don't mean to say it's some kind of band-aid treatment. Just be careful that you don't get to thinking that those extra elements can always transform an otherwise ordinary shot, or that you shouldn't be satisfied with shots that don't have so much of them.
I apologize if that made no sense.
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