C&C Request: Orchestra

[OrionsByte]

My mother-in-law performed with the local Family Orchestra at the mall today, and since we were attending anyways I decided to bring my camera, hoping the light would be okay. It wasn't... I didn't bring any lighting equipment because I wasn't there in any kind of official capacity and I didn't want to be a distraction, but I wish I'd at least brought my speedlight. Anyways, I set the ISO to 800 and shot away.

I wanted C&C on this one particular shot, just because I'm interested in the opinions. I wanted a shot in which my mother-in-law was the subject, included some of the rest of the orchestra, and looked like Christmastime.

So what I'm interested to hear from everyone is:

• Does this shot work?
• Does the selective focus work, or is the foreground too distracting?
• What might you have done differently compositionally?

Thanks in advance!

 

[tirediron]

I'm not sure that it works especially well, however with shots of this nature are often 'take what you can get' in terms of composition and opportunity. The selective focus certainly helps to isolate the subject, but I would suggest a slight brightening of the image, and cropping some of the RH side of the image. The background is distracting, but again, not much can be done about it.

 

[Aerin328]

Hello Orion! I agree w/ Tirediron in that the focus on your mother-in-law helps to clearly isolate her, which can be hard to do w/out the right lens when she's in an orchestra mob. However I feel terribly distracted by the out of focus elements in front of her. I like the "thirds" feel of there being three elements (her, the violinist, and the tree), but there's also so much unrelated detail going on in the picture I don't get any sense of a "message" from it. Agreed also though that it can be difficult to exclude detail in such a busy scene! And if your goal was to record her participation and simultaneously communicate that it was Christmas time, you've done that. I guess the real question will be, does she like it / appreciate it?

 

[FireGOD]

I really like it, maybe a bit brighter.

 

[Karri]

I like the selective focus but the arm with the white shirt in the right foreground is really distracting for me. I am thinking you wanted to include the tree that's in the far right foreground for the Christmas spirit but you may want to crop it down further for more focus on your MIL...

 

[white]

I like this photo because of its apparent contradiction -- she looks very sad, almost like she's just going through the motions, despite it being Christmas and a "joyful" time of year.

Maybe crop the floating ear on the left, but that's it.