Little smaller than I'd like, but appears to be at around the film grain size, so I don't think there's much lost detail, and Puccini is hard to find good photographs of. First (here) of a set of images released by the Archivio Storico Ricordi.
Support – taking an exception to the pixel count requirement: historic photo, and DOF is quite shallow so it doesn't look like more pixels would give us more detail. Bammesk (talk) 16:13, 27 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
A really very nice image. Kind of your standard "bad, but not that bad" restoration: A couple corners to recreate, but just of a bokeh-style backdrop, a couple cracks, that sort of thing. Looks more impressive than it is.
Is the photo cut on the left side? The "Mishkin" watermark looks like it was cut off in the original. There's several areas of white on the left edge of the photo. MER-C18:19, 22 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose because it was grayscale, not monochrome. I don't know if it will be replaced into color-converted image like that, like coloring black and white or grayscale photos. Evan0512 (talk) 00:19, 24 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 3 Oct 2020 at 21:00:11 (UTC)
Original – Helena Hill (married name: Helena Hill Weed) was an American Suffragette and one of the first female geologists in America
Reason
One of the better-shot photographs of suffragettes. It's quite a nice image, good resolution, and the suffragette is notable enough. Also, yes, I know I have a lot of nominations. A few of them were delayed by various things, so I've been collecting finished ones.
Comment. I'm split on this one. On the one hand, it has a clear view of the whole mountain, unlike File:Mtandromeda.jpg which only shows a closeup of the face and File:Icefields Parkway near Columbia Icefield.jpg where Mount Athabasca is more prominent in the foreground with Mount Andromeda behind it. And it is the lead image of its article. On the other hand the light is dull compared to either of those other two photos and I think the sense of scale given by the people in foreground is a false one (the people are much closer than the mountain causing them to appear much larger in the photo than the features of the mountain behind them). —David Eppstein (talk) 17:00, 28 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Comment – There is loss of sharpness on the left and the right side. I agree with David, the lighting is dull. It reduces the wow factor. Bammesk (talk) 03:56, 29 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 8 Oct 2020 at 01:08:02 (UTC)
Original – Tannhäuser, Act III set design
Reason
A fine, early-production image by notable set designers, and really colourful and lovely to boot. from the same set as the previously-featured File:Max Brückner - Otto Henning - Richard Wagner - Final scene of Götterdämmerung.jpg though I did treat which I nominated differently as the image is on a separate paper to the mount, and was slightly tilted relative to the mount in this case. A CSS crop cannot rotate.
Self-portrait of Judith Leyster, a notable woman artist of the Dutch Golden Age, used as the lead image for her article. Typical of her work in composition and execution, showing also one of her unfinished paintings as a scene-within-a-scene. In the National Gallery of Art, with a high-quality scan donated by the National Gallery of Art. (Note that there's also a Google Art Project scan of the same painting, linked from The Proposition (painting); I like the slightly rosier shade of the nominated version from the National Gallery a little better than the slightly greener shade of the Google one, but they're very close and I could go with either. We should certainly avoid the vertically-compressed book scan and the color-corrected version).
Support Boring composition, but we're hardly oversaturated with images from the Indian subcontinent, so we can add a difficulty-of-acquiring factor Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 7.5% of all FPs18:53, 1 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support I'm not a fan of the blank background, but this is a good portrait as it clearly shows the subject and has a hint of character. Nick-D (talk) 01:59, 3 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support - I cropped the image to fix some basic portrait composition problems: subject off-center, eyes below the top-third of image. If you clear your cache, it should look better now. Kaldari (talk) 20:31, 9 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Fine illustration of what was probably Puccini's least successful work - and only his second opera - and hence hard to illustrate. Another of the Ricordi images. Didn't think it needed restoration.
Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 13 Oct 2020 at 07:53:58 (UTC)
Original – Swami Agnivesh
Reason
Portrait of an eminent political leader and social reformer with good quality as per FP standards, good lighting and composition. Very high EV. He passed away last month. Therefore, there is no chance to get a better picture than this in future.
Support, though it you have this at higher resolution, I think it would benefit. Though given its size (an odd number of pixels, indicating a crop to the relevant area), I suspect all the usable photo is there. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 7.6% of all FPs14:57, 4 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
This does kind of seem like your classic Commons-but-not-necessarily-En-Wiki FP. It's very artistic, but the artistry might reduce encyclopedic value (EV) a bit, and EV is much bigger here. File:Platanthera chlorantha LC0225.jpg gives a completely different view that says a lot more about the plant. That said, there's some beautiful detail, so Weak SupportAdam Cuerden(talk)Has about 7.6% of all FPs20:30, 7 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 14 Oct 2020 at 03:26:22 (UTC)
Original – Marie Stopes in her laboratory at Manchester University, 1904
Reason
I do like photographs of people at work, and this is a nice photo. Second in her article - a more generic head shot forms the lead - but I'd say the best of the two.
Support, but the references in the article about this painting need improvement. A quick search found Hannah Elizabeth Miller, "A Partner in Their Suffering: Gustav Klimt's Empowered Figure in Hope II", MA thesis, BYU, https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/6429/ and Julia F. Dailey, "Reclaiming Gustav Klimt's Artwork Hope II As Vision: Representations of Grief, Maternity and Spirituality", graduate thesis, U Texas at Tyler, http://hdl.handle.net/10950/1331 as possibilities, as well as other scholarly works on broader topics that mention the painting, and a piece in ArtNews involving its provenance [1]. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:17, 8 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• From Criterion No. 1: "...has no highly distracting or obstructing elements."
• Target article doesn't mention the 2004 Ottawa performance outside the photo caption, so I don't see how this 16-year-old pic "adds significant encyclopedic value to [the] article."
My view is that this is a picture of him performing. Pyrotechnics are a regular part of metal concerts, and so it does a good job of showing a typical dramatic moment of such a concert. Just like you ideally wouldn't illustrate a theatrical show by showing actors having a commonplace conversation from it, you'd choose a dramatic moment where there's a lot of action and reaction, you wouldn't try to show "metal musician performing" with a simply-lit sing-into-microphone moment. There's other photographs that cover him not mid-dramatic-performance. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 7.6% of all FPs08:12, 10 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Good photo of a heavy metal musician at work. I'm honestly baffled by the oppose votes above - this is what big ticket heavy metal performances look like, so there's heaps of EV. Nick-D (talk) 09:38, 14 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Jennifer Doudna is the recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the development of a method for genome editing", along with Emmanuelle Charpentier. She has received several other awards and is active in the field of COVID testing as well. I saw her name on the main-page yesterday and thought this is a good candidate. The photo is a bit grainy, but given the encyclopedic value I think we can take an exception. (sidenote: ISO is 320, I think the grain is an intentional artistic choice.)
Would've liked more depth of field, but, given the photographers are giving it a pass on that, I'm guessing that's difficult, so, SupportAdam Cuerden(talk)Has about 7.6% of all FPs19:16, 15 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
While mainly known for one song nowadays - the Dance of the Hours - that's a song almost everyone knows. Many composers don't even have that. Plus, it's a very nice little cabinet card, I think. If we ever get an article on the photographer, it should definitely appear in it, but the lead image of a notable composer is certainly sufficient.
As far as I can tell, it was automatically uploaded by a bot from the museum image. So when you say "It's a lot brighter than the original image, and that's not documented", I think it would be closer to the truth to say "The image that the museum now makes available is a lot less bright than the one they made available when the bot uploaded it, and they have not documented that change." I think the brighter version looks better; whether it accurately reflects the present level of aging and restoration of the original artwork is of course a different question, but one that without access to the painting itself I have little way of answering. I don't think it would be an improvement to replace with the version the museum currently makes available, though, for a different reason: that version is covered by vertical streaks of distracting white dots, for instance across the face of the taller musician, possibly a combination of cracking in its varnish combined with how it was lit for the scan, possibly because the earlier version (the one we have) included some digital restoration which they later decided to omit. Whatever the reason, it looks worse independent of its choice of light/dark balance. (Also the current museum version appears to be higher resolution and with higher saturation levels, to the point where it looks like the maid has heavy mascara, but again I don't know whether the increased saturation is more or less accurate to the physical object.) —David Eppstein (talk) 04:55, 15 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Slight oppose original, support alt 1 I think the new scan available from the museum site is substantially superior. The white crackles are fairly easy to deal with, and in any case don't appear in properly-resized versions; and when zoomed in it's substantially more detailed, and looks far more like a real painting. I've uploaded an extremely quick edit (light dust and scratch filter, slight level adjustment) of the new scan; I'd be a bit loath to promote that as is, as it's clearly not a full restoration, but equally I think it already exceeds the old version so I think it would also be odd to promote the older scan. TSP (talk) 16:27, 20 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, perhaps - I'm never sure how far it is sensible to depart from the judgement of the uploading museum on these questions (though in this case they have provided two very different interpretations). As I say, I'm sure this could be improved upon; I just felt even this 10-minute edit already exceeded the original. TSP (talk) 13:45, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
High quality large image. FP on Commons. Unusually for birds, it is quite impossible to determine the species of many females of the Sporophila genus from a photo.
Does a nice job at illustrating Verdi in his late life. His companion Teresa Stolz, the Ricordis who helped his career, his adopted daughter Maria Carrara Verdi, his sister-in-law Barbarina Strepponi; Umberto Campanari, brother to Leandro Campanari, and one of Verdi's estate lawyers - every person in this has a strong connection to Verdi, and it's photographed at Verdi's house. Downside is it's a bit busy, and not every person is as relevant to every article it appears in. Arguably a little off-centre, though given the varying elements - the tight group left, loose grouping right; the gap between the trees more left, the statue left, the people stretching further right, and such, the composition feels artistic to me without need of cuts.
Comment – Nom. needs a descriptive caption. In the interest of historical transparency, the text should include the fact that, before 1945, the city was the German Breslau, and that this version of the town hall was built in 1860-1863 as the Breslauer Rathaus. – Sca (talk) 14:13, 17 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Charlesjsharp: I think there's maybe two or three nominations up at the moment (and one of them is the revised caption to this one) that do much more than simply state what the image is of as briefly as possible. If we all agree this is important and start doing it, fine, but we shouldn't hold a nomination to a standard none of us are holding themselves to. I've listed a couple of my nomination descriptions below. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 7.6% of all FPs23:42, 18 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
POTD is a full, multi-paragraph blurb; no FPC nomination is lengthy enough for that. I'm pretty sure FPC captions are never looked at or used again once the nomination closes. The file description page matters; captions here really don't. Anyway, Support [Edit: Moving this somewhere it can be read more easily] Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 7.6% of all FPs12:38, 18 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
IMO, some summary info about the subject of the pic – no matter what or who – is necessary here for users to make reasonably informed judgments. That seems obvious to me. – Sca (talk) 14:01, 18 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Some summary info should be included here for the convenience of users. Quite odd, and unhelpful, to ID the pic with just the name of the file. However, the historical info above was intended also as a suggestion to the nominator. – Sca (talk) 15:51, 18 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Sca: I don't know. I look down at my and other people's captions below, and, while I might have needed more words to describe historical images, I just don't feel they're really much more detailed. Using only my own work as... you know, I can grant myself permission to do that, I think I am definitely guilty of exactly the same thing you're criticising this nom for:
Those might have a few more words, but do they really provide much more context? And both are passing. Now, whether we should say more might be worth discussion, but it feels odd to only call out this image when, for example, my A basso porto nom had just about as much context, a major typo in the description (just fixed), and is passing without comment. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 7.6% of all FPs23:36, 18 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Adam Cuerden and Sca: As someone who has been doing quite a bit of POTD blurb writing recently, I look at the nomination page and caption, which often provides information not immediately obvious to the observer. The caption is especially important if the linked article is stubby or the image does not have an informative description. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 11:33, 25 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Good capture of a notable and interesting building, an appropriate choice of lead image for its article, and the human fork adds some flavor of the goings-on in the foreground plaza. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:07, 18 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It is a fair point. I know that an inufficient article rightly blocks POTD, though I think that there's also the argument that more eyes can be good for getting an article improved. Perhaps I should have nominated this as an example of Cambon's art, or get it into Hugo's article. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 7.6% of all FPs23:47, 18 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I expanded it a tiny bit--there's more in the same sources, particularly Affron. I also ran up against a problem: while English-language sources all seem to describe the play as a failure (as does our article), I saw several French-language sources that insist it wasn't (as does fr:Les Burgraves). I'm not sure how to resolve that--my French isn't good enough to evaluate the reliability of the contrary information. blameless01:48, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It's a high-quality image from the Ricordi archive. I do, however, need to give a couple notes: This image is undated, which, unfortunately, does reduce the EV, and, as an Act V set design, this appears well down the article. I think it's still valuable, but that does need noted to the voters.