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Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Image:Bastille 2007-05-06 anti Sarkozy 487623928 37656cd319 o.jpg

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Rioting at the Bastille

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A gendarme mobile in full riot control gear, shooting tear gas, during the night riots around the Place de la Bastille following Nicolas Sarkozy's election to the presidency of the French Republic.
Reason
This gendarme looks like Robocop... Good impression of what it means to encounter these (to be fair, the rioters use cobblestones and probably also Molotov cocktails.
Articles this image appears in
Tear gas, French Gendarmerie
Creator
Mikael Marguerie
I'm somewhat taken aback by these arguments. One reason why there is a FP process on en:, in addition to the one at Commons, is to be able to reward pictures that have great intensity and topical interest for encyclopedic articles, yet may not be "technically" super good.
In particular, there is no way that one could take photos of a scene of night rioting with ultra-crisp precision and no artefacts. This guy is not posing; he's firing real ammunition at real people. By the same token, the world-famous, Pulitzer-winning photo of Kim Phuc would have been rejected as a FP: blurry, enormous grain, etc.
If the criteria taken into account are the same than at Commons, then the en: FP system should be folded, since it is redundant. David.Monniaux 19:59, 29 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Quite agreed : there is a disturbing tendency to obsess with technical criteria which are irrelevant in many cases and produce a heavy bias towards studio macro photography and shots of fornicating insects and swans. Rama 20:07, 29 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - I think this criticism is overblown. I've frequently seen votes here that say "subject matter makes up for technical flaws" (ex. 1, ex. 2), and to compare the Kim Phuc photo to this one is quite a stretch. --TotoBaggins 21:50, 29 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The same reasoning apply. Sorry, but the Kim Phuc photo is way noisy and blurry. I understand that, of course, a mobile shooting tear gas is less topical than a little girl burned by Napalm, but if your only angle of comment is technical quality, I'm afraid that Kim Phuc does not make it. I may even say that with that kind of elements of appreciations, you'll only find studio or staged photos, or photos of events in bright sunset, but no photos of live events at night. Photos of night events are necessarily somewhat noisy or blurry, because of the limitation of sensitivity of cameras (that is, unless they are "staged" and there is in fact projectors etc. to get decent lighting).
Since the only criteria that appeared to be used were purely technical, the process seemed quite identical to COM:FP, whereas the Commons' FP crowd claims that Wikipedia FPs are judged according to topicality. David.Monniaux 07:06, 30 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
To David: Sorry if my criticism came off as unnecessarily rough. I understand the difficulty in taking the pic but the jpg artifacts can easily be avoided. The very first criteria of a FP "Is of a high technical standard", with the exception of historical pics. Although the pic was hard to capture, the photographer had plenty of opportunities to take better shots...he took at least 15 shots of the "gendarme mobile" from behind the police line. [1] The artifacts might be due to how Flickr handle pics, so I'm sure the photographer has better version. Also, I don't believe it'll be in the best interest of Wikipedia to close the FP system. Jumping cheese Cont@ct 00:13, 30 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
But all these images sport the same insufficient depth of field, numerical noise and sometimes motion blur. Because they are of fast action in the dark. Or maybe because they are not of flamingos shagging in the sunset, I don't know. Rama 05:32, 30 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
with all of the riots in France it shouldn't be too hard to find another one of them on the streets in the near future
This is offtopic, but I think not. The originality of this one is that it took place in central Paris and was done apparently by left-wing political activists (anarchists etc.). This is way different from riots happening in distant suburbs that most people never set foot into, and where nobody with a good camera will go anyway. :-) David.Monniaux 07:06, 30 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I'm pretty sure that was tongue-in-cheek. =) Jumping cheese Cont@ct 08:37, 30 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
David, you're right... but since it's such a narrow show and only used in tear gas and French Gendarmerie is my main problem with it. If there was an article about the post-election rioting then maybe this or something like it would be a good image... but, the police man doesn't show the uniqueness of the situation. gren グレン 10:39, 30 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose For lack of subject illustration, mainly. It's remarkable in some ways, not least the capture conditions, but unremarkable in most others. Also the fact that so much discussion is required to establish what's going on in the shot is telling; there's no real action in it at all. Consequently, higher res or less compression wouldn't really cut it either.
    FWIW, the technical aspects of this shot are way down my list of criteria. I could barely care less about noise, artifacts and resolution for this kind of subject. The fact that noone mentioned motion blur when it was taken at 1/6th of a second during a riot is definitely the most impressive thing about it, but not enough for FP.
    mikaultalk 13:54, 31 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong3 oppose Per the other oppose comments. Frankly, I first thought it was a toilet seat, then I thought it looked like someone was spraying his shop-window clean. If only one could see what was actually going on and take a technically better photo of the subject I might be inclinded to support. PS. Please note that my vote is Strong 'to the power of three' oppose - (that's strong x strong x strong) MorningRazor 22:13, 2 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Not promoted MER-C 04:01, 4 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

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