Constrained Beauty

[fjrabon]

DSC_0037 by franklinrabon, on Flickr

There is an iron works type place a half block from my apartment. I always kind of want to go in and take some pictures, but it's only open during normal daylight hours, when the sun is already really harsh. I took this one through the fence this evening right after sunset. Was a bit unsure about what DoF to use, as I sorta wanted the barbed-wire on the chain-link fence in the background to come through, for the contrast. However, having that much DoF brought a lot of trash into play. The subject statue is actually part of a water fountain, and has a pump built in, hence the plug. For some reason I really liked the contrast of the electrical plug. This was actually probably the cleanest angle, with the best light, given the fence and the fact that there were cast iron statues piled everywhere, but I actually sort of liked the small statue of the boy in the background.

C&C is greatly appreciated as always, be it on the composition, technical aspects or the B&W conversion.

Thanks!

 

[sleist]

Nice idea. A couple thoughts:

DOF could be shallower to get rid of the busy background.
Not sure if it's underexposed or the effect of your conversion, but the statue is too dark - maybe the use of some selective color filter sliders could help that. What B&W conversion software to you use?
The lines of the fence make the photo look slightly crooked - I can see that you would loose some of the base on correction though.

A nice idea though.

 

[fjrabon]

Nice idea. A couple thoughts:

DOF could be shallower to get rid of the busy background.
Not sure if it's underexposed or the effect of your conversion, but the statue is too dark - maybe the use of some selective color filter sliders could help that. What B&W conversion software to you use?
The lines of the fence make the photo look slightly crooked - I can see that you would loose some of the base on correction though.

A nice idea though.

yeah, though there wasn't all that much I could do about that (at least I think there wasn't), since the statue is cast iron, ie black. I actually dodged it up quite a bit to get to this point. And I pumped the green a bit, which brightened the statue up some as well. I used aperture, which has both RGB sliders for B&W conversions and also I used curves some. It was definitely a tricky balance of getting enough contrast while brightening the black statue that was taken with ambient light that was just after sunset.

Hmm, I could rotate it, because I cropped a bit off the edges, but then the statue wouldn't be straight, I dont think. I think the effect you're noting is because I was shooting at about a 135 angle to the fence.

Thanks for the comments!

 

[sleist]

What's the color version look like, if you don't mind?

 

[fjrabon]

DSC_0037 - Version 2 by franklinrabon, on Flickr

That's the original.

 

[sleist]

Well, you had a tough starting point. I worked on it for a bit and I'll show you what I came up with.
Part of me hopes you hate it because I'm not sure I could explain everything I did to get here.
If you do hate it let me know and I'll delete the post.

 

[fjrabon]

Well, you had a tough starting point. I worked on it for a bit and I'll show you what I came up with.
Part of me hopes you hate it because I'm not sure I could explain everything I did to get here.
If you do hate it let me know and I'll delete the post.

ha, I definitely don't hate it and I'm pretty sure I know most of what you did. I tend to like detailed lower midtones with lots of contrast, which I think is part of why the edit I did came out darker overall as well. The only thing I don't really like (and I had this problem too when I tried to brighten it too much with RGB sliders) is the unevenness of her 'skin' in your edit. But overall, it's a take I like a lot.

It was one of those photos where I was shooting something else, and kind of turned around and saw it and sort of fired off a shot, and then went back to what I was shooting. Thanks for the time and comments!

 

[sleist]

Cool. The things that made the most difference (to me anyway) were compositional.

Your original crop left out the lily pads - I was surprised when I saw this in the original shot as I think it's a huge part of this sculpture.
Your crop made it look like she was stuck in cement and I was confused by that initially, but it fit with your title so ...

The other figure in the background was what really ruined the composition for me.
I was lucky to be able to get rid of it and not make the fence look like crap in the process.
I used CS5 content aware spot healing brush to get rid of her.

Straightening is obvious.

If you are serious about B&W conversion, Nik's Silver Efex Pro 2 is a fantastic plugin that works in both CS5 and Lightroom.
I highly recommend it.

I see you shoot Nikon. I highly recommend using Capture NX2 for RAW processing - you are shooting RAW aren't you?
It does complicate the workflow if you are very used to Lightroom because LR will not see the edits you perform on the NEF unless you save as a TIFF (or something else) after processing in Capture.

The only other thing I want to mention is that I sometimes find it helpful to over process the color image first in a manner that helps you differentiate the different tones when you do the B+W conversion - particularly with a "questionable image".It may look like shat in color, but if you can get the image colors differentiated enough prior to performing the conversion, it can help the color filters better isolate your subject from the rest of the scene.

Time for bed.

 

[fjrabon]

Cool. The things that made the most difference (to me anyway) were compositional.

Your original crop left out the lily pads - I was surprised when I saw this in the original shot as I think it's a huge part of this sculpture.
Your crop made it look like she was stuck in cement and I was confused by that initially, but it fit with your title so ...

The other figure in the background was what really ruined the composition for me.
I was lucky to be able to get rid of it and not make the fence look like crap in the process.
I used CS5 content aware spot healing brush to get rid of her.

Straightening is obvious.

If you are serious about B&W conversion, Nik's Silver Efex Pro 2 is a fantastic plugin that works in both CS5 and Lightroom.
I highly recommend it.

I see you shoot Nikon. I highly recommend using Capture NX2 for RAW processing - you are shooting RAW aren't you?
It does complicate the workflow if you are very used to Lightroom because LR will not see the edits you perform on the NEF unless you save as a TIFF (or something else) after processing in Capture.

The only other thing I want to mention is that I sometimes find it helpful to over process the color image first in a manner that helps you differentiate the different tones when you do the B+W conversion - particularly with a "questionable image".It may look like shat in color, but if you can get the image colors differentiated enough prior to performing the conversion, it can help the color filters better isolate your subject from the rest of the scene.

Time for bed.

yeah, I shoot in RAW. I use Aperture and sometimes photoshop elements. Never really got into lightroom. I've used Capture NX2 for RAW processing, and it had its pros, but I usually just use Aperture's RAW converter, which is really good as well.

 

[amolitor]

The background is essential. If you get rid of it it's just a picture of a statue, ho hum. The original is a fine piece of work, there's good separation between the foreground figure and the material in the background, so there's no visual confusion, and there's enough background to give some context. The viewer sees the pretty girl, and recognizes it for a statue, and later comes to realize that it's in a yard with other stuff. We get a sense of jumbled/abandoned statuary, or possibly secondhand stuff for sale, whatever you like. There's enough stuff to make it interesting, and to make a bigger story, but not so much that the viewer is denied the opportunity to fill in that story.

It's a good picture as is, and I think you made basically the right choices throughout.

 

[YoungPhotoGirl]

Almost shat myself when I realised that was a statue haha
My eyes have been staring at the computer too long I think!

 

[sleist]

The background is essential. If you get rid of it it's just a picture of a statue, ho hum. The original is a fine piece of work, there's good separation between the foreground figure and the material in the background, so there's no visual confusion, and there's enough background to give some context. The viewer sees the pretty girl, and recognizes it for a statue, and later comes to realize that it's in a yard with other stuff. We get a sense of jumbled/abandoned statuary, or possibly secondhand stuff for sale, whatever you like. There's enough stuff to make it interesting, and to make a bigger story, but not so much that the viewer is denied the opportunity to fill in that story.

It's a good picture as is, and I think you made basically the right choices throughout.

So, what you're saying is that the original shot - posted in post #5 - is exactly the shot you would you would set up for?
You're saying that the photo is post #5 is your idea of a perfectly composed and well exposed photo?

 

[AlanE]

I like the original... The interesting components to me are both statues, the woman (fountain) and the thirsty man. Another thought would be to juxtapose these images to build on that theme...

 

[amolitor]

No, by 'original' I mean the image first posted. I admit that this might be a bit confusing, since 'original' could also mean the earliest possible version or something, but in this case it doesn't mean that and it's frankly unreasonable to assume that it does since a) 'original' is largely meaningless in that sense in this age of digital cameras and b) the image in post #5 has obvious flaws.

 

[fjrabon]

I like the original... The interesting components to me are both statues, the woman (fountain) and the thirsty man. Another thought would be to juxtapose these images to build on that theme...

Thanks for the comments. Can you give an example of what you meant by juxtaposing the images to build ont hat theme?