This was a difficult challenge. The situations that I found myself in were, at times, very uncomfortable, expecially while photographing gangs and a crowd of mostly illegal aliens. I took almost 500 pictures and and narrowed the field down to five choices to enter. This one could have been better if the guy hadn't seen me taking his picture. Once he did, he wouldn't stop looking into the camera and posing for me. I wanted to capture his constant grimace and lazy eye for the character.
To meet the challenge description as close as possible I wanted to blur the crowd using only "minimal depth-of-field", not gaussian blur. To accomplish this, I used my zoom lense and set the aperture to f/2.8.
Statistics
Place: 34 out of 109 Avg (all users): 5.7769 Avg (commenters): 7.1250 Avg (participants): 5.3594 Avg (non-participants): 5.9198 Views since voting: 1623 Views during voting: 376 Votes: 251 Comments: 14 Favorites: 0
Hi, as requested, here is an indepth critique of your submission.
First Impression - the most important one: Wow, luck of the draw I get to discuss this photo with you again. It's quite a good shot and does meet the challenge well.
Composition: I like how you framed your subject here, but the "frame" itself is a bit cluttered to be as effective as it could be.
Subject: Subject is clear, but once again I'm distracted by all the clutter. By that, I mean I can tell too much of what is going on with everyone else. As mentioned in the forumns the pont of view is from inside the mob. A more omnipetent point of view may have broguht "singled" him out more.
Technical (Colour, focus, and light): Colour: quite nice... but for some reason, my eye is seeing his color as being different than the rest of the image. He seems more saturated than everything else. I'm not sure why.
Focus: Very sharp in his eyes, but fades a little too fast from there.
Light: Well lit, and very well exposed.
To grow its vote?: Point of view, I believe or simplification of the frame. Your outtake that you showed us, I feel with its simplicity and interest would have score quite a bit better.
Summary: It is a good photo, very good technicals. Just a few compostional adjustments could have made this really something really special.
I gave this a 6. I thought the character/eccentricity capture was fairly good and that it was a fairly good candid capture within the crowd/environment. The main 'criticism' I had was: although the gentleman was 'singled out', he (and the dog) did not 'stand out' enough in my opinion. The character(s) were colorful, but the crowd was even more colorful, thus detracting again from the impact of the 'singled out' subject(s). The dog possibly in focus as well and more visible, a finer crop especially the lady on the left and the 'blown'/overexposed people/objects in the distance and possibly also at the bottom, especially to eliminate that 'pink leg/brown shoe', may have made this better in my opinion. Also, fairly minor (but causes additional issues in trying to adjust in pp), the reflection/blown' area on the gentleman's forehead is slightly distracting/detracting. The lighting may have been better utilized from another angle, depending what was there/you had access to, obviously. His seemingly smallish frame/build makes it even harder to 'single him out'. Lastly, although the focus seems good (also for 'isolating using range'), but a little sharper would be even better, just seems a fraction blurry, but could be resizing issues, etc. In my opinion, even a 'perfect shot' of a character like this (with or without dog), likely starts to get into areas of 'novelty'/subject matter and personal preferences, style/taste; if you've seen it before, then it is not so novel and the 'character impact' may not be as strong &/or some people/viewers will 'see' something other than 'the novelty' or 'character', if that makes sense. Difficult, and you obviously attempted many shots as mentioned, so well done for making a concerted effort to try to 'meet the Challenge', which you did well, in my opinion.
I can't help you. I gave you an 8. The only ones I scored higher were pictures that were particularly stunning or beautiful that also met the challenge.
Thanks for all the encouraging comments during this challenge, I really got my hopes up. I tried to meet the challenge description and thought I did so. None of these comments said otherwise and the DOF was totally done prior to post processing. So now that it's over I feel totally let down and I would greatly appreciate constructive criticism. What is wrong with this photo for this challenge and/or what would have made it better for this challenge?
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