Salute to the fallen

[rlemert]

There's a hot air balloon festival taking place locally this weekend, and I'll post pictures of the balloons in a later thread. In honor of memorial day, however, they've set up a "field of flags". For $3 you can dedicate a flag to a fallen serviceman or woman and add it to the collection.

(This is taken from the camera's jpeg, and I've bumped up the brightness a little bit more in gimp to better bring out the wreath. The original also has the helmet centered, so I've cropped to reduce the amount of blown-out sky present. Suggestions for improvement are welcome - especially since one of my major reasons for going out to this event was to practice on something interesting.)

 

[tirediron]

In many ways, this is some of the most difficult photography to do really well because you have no control over anything. You can't control the people, background, etc. I think the key change I would have made were it an image I shot would have been to change my point of focus and use a much larger aperture. Standing further back with long glass and focusing on the helmet would have allowed you to get both the flags and wreath in focus while rendering the background much more softly. Also waiting a moment or two until the chap in the white trousers, who is so perfectly framed between the flags had moved on wouldn't have hurt.

 

[Dean_Gretsch]

There is a lot going on in the photo. My eyes are like a hummingbird, flitting here and then there. My biggest concern in my photos is " did I crop too much, not enough?". I agree that the focal point might have worked better if the wreath and helmet were positioned so we could read the writing on the wreath. In many shots, I like to do selective focus so different parts of the same scene is in focus to draw the eye where I want.