A cute couple

sashbar · Oct 5, 2014

Derrel said:
Not every image benefits from the common, knee-jerk TPF re-work approach we typically see, which is to crop the living $hi+ out of the OP's original image and somehow think that,"Makes a better picture." In cases like the first shot, the OP's night shot of the elderly man and woman, and the second shot, the scene of the elderly man and woman, each with a cane: how those people are relating to the real-world before them, and their place within a larger scene, THAT realtionship is the picture.

I find the same reflexive tendency toward very heavy cropping of street scenes leads to a lot of boring shot re-works where we see far too little, at too high a magnification, with the shots often stripped of their original context. Just as in a movie, there are long shots or "establishing shots", medium shots, close-ups, and extreme close-ups. One cannot successful live by bread alone, just the same way one cannot automatically take any image and think that cropping the living $hi+ out of it is the way to make it "better". Making everything into a medium shot, or a close-up, is not always the answer.

Some shots are meant to be "scenes", with people in them. There's a mentality here on TPF that in street work, there can be no 'scene' left in anything that's to be considered a good picture. It's time to start addressing that tendency toward cropping wayyyyy too much out, in a knee-jerk type of way that ignores the value of the overview shot, or the medium shot.

The original photo is almost perfect, as-shown originally. Same with the second shot.

Very well said.

W.Y.Photo · Oct 5, 2014

Derrel said:
Not every image benefits from the common, knee-jerk TPF re-work approach we typically see, which is to crop the living $hi+ out of the OP's original image and somehow think that,"Makes a better picture." In cases like the first shot, the OP's night shot of the elderly man and woman, and the second shot, the scene of the elderly man and woman, each with a cane: how those people are relating to the real-world before them, and their place within a larger scene, THAT realtionship is the picture.

I find the same reflexive tendency toward very heavy cropping of street scenes leads to a lot of boring shot re-works where we see far too little, at too high a magnification, with the shots often stripped of their original context. Just as in a movie, there are long shots or "establishing shots", medium shots, close-ups, and extreme close-ups. One cannot successful live by bread alone, just the same way one cannot automatically take any image and think that cropping the living $hi+ out of it is the way to make it "better". Making everything into a medium shot, or a close-up, is not always the answer.

Some shots are meant to be "scenes", with people in them. There's a mentality here on TPF that in street work, there can be no 'scene' left in anything that's to be considered a good picture. It's time to start addressing that tendency toward cropping wayyyyy too much out, in a knee-jerk type of way that ignores the value of the overview shot, or the medium shot.

The original photo is almost perfect, as-shown originally. Same with the second shot.

I completely agree with your input and have taken it into consideration for how I would go about editing the image. I was originally intending to crop out the right and top in favor of a tighter composition but I believe that even the tiny subtleties that I have in the scene can have a much more profound effect as a whole (such as the two people having a conversation in the right of the image) So I decided against a tighter composition and instead cropped only distracting edgeframe details like the traffic cone to the right.

I changed the exposure and brightness in order make the couple stand out more as Lew suggested and have removed the lights from the top. On top of that, flickr massively oversharpened my image so now it looks like crap! :beaten:

I tried cloning out the truck but It actually seems to make the image less appealing to me.. It seems the truck is a distraction when its there but its even more of a distraction for it to not be there :chargrined:

Is the color working for everyone? I haven't color corrected as I'm afraid to color correct from my laptops uncalibrated screen. Doesn't seem like a sterile enough color balancing system if you know what I mean.