Caught my son Ryan by surprise when he was a climbing a fence that he knows he shouldn't! He is such a determined ,independant and sometimes stubborn little boy that I couldn't resist the title for this photograph !
Post processing :
Resize for DPC
minor spot cloning
Dodge and burn minor areas
Adjustment layers for levels, brightness and contrast.
Channel mixer for conversion to B/W Tweak RGB's
USM
Add Border
Feel free to leave any comments.
Statistics
Place: 73 out of 251 Avg (all users): 5.8745 Avg (commenters): 6.6364 Avg (participants): 5.7544 Avg (non-participants): 5.9915 Views since voting: 808 Views during voting: 320 Votes: 231 Comments: 12 Favorites: 0
The first thing I notice here is that there really are no whites. The image is quite grey, even the whites of his eyes are grey. I played with this a little bit and adjusted contrast and brightness and it seemed like it came out a bit too bright, especially on his face. I bet that was the reason you chose to go greyish instead of 'too brightish'. The only solution I would see to that would be some selective editing to make some areas whiter, without making the already lighter areas too bright.
There is a diagonal line from the fence that goes directly through the center of Ryan's head. What looks like the rest of the fence then comes out the back of his head under his ear. It doesn't seem from your description that you had a lot of time to worry about background elements, but it does kind of create an odd visual of the head being 'chopped off' by background elements. What happens there, is that we look at the subject (the boys head) and then items 'coming out of his head' draw us away from his face. In this case, my eyes want to follow the diagonal in the background, and almost skip right over him.
Focus and clarity are really good in my opinion. I like the detail in his face and hair. I like how the background is blurred leaving more focus on the subject himself.
Without the explaination, it seems odd to cut his arms off like that, but I see why and it makes sense now and it's a funny story.
Overall I think it's a fine portrait of this cute young man. With a different angle on the background and brighter whites, I think this would be perfect. As is though, still a nice photo for the albums. :)
~Heather~
If I didn't know better, I'd think that Anthony was trying to wish me away into the corn field.
Good DOF. I'm not sure that I like the arms reaching out of the frame, but it does seem to hint at a reason for his penetrating stare. Although I'm not typically a fan of selective desaturation, desaturating everything but his eyes might have given this image that extra kick needed to score within the top 30%.
Overall sharpness is lacking. Did you do a post processing sharpening on this after you resized it? A lot of times a light unsharp mask after resize will bring back the original pop you had at full size.
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