Man Crossing Street

[Fred Berg]

..................

 

[fjrabon]

I'm not always anti-tilt, but this smacks of 'just because' tilt.

It's also very unbalanced. We have the man closer to the edge he's walking out of, which lends towards a lot of weight on the image's left side, but the only counterbalancing elements we have on the right are a van.

The tilt has created some natural diagonals, but they don't do anything.
The subject isn't particularly sharp.

When choosing a subject, they should generally be some combination of: beautiful, interesting or empathetic. This guy is neither, he looks extremely normal, so any sense of mystery because we can't see his face is killed. He isn't looking at us, so we lose the visual interest nearly all faces have, and there's nothing particularly beautiful about a man we can barely see.

Exposure wise, the high contrast doesn't seem to match the obvious fog. The sky is blown out, unlike the sort of grey overcast we would expect given the other weather visual cues.

The only sense of drama is the possibility he's about to be hit, but there are no real indicators that the cars are moving instead of parked, which kills that angle of drama and visual interest. If the cars are in fact moving, you would probalby have been better served to go with a slower shutter speed to give them a bit of motion blur, which would give the image a story. As is, it looks like they're parked.

The sense of depth provided by the atmospherics and relatively wide angle are nice. The repeating visual keys of the cars also lend to this sense of depth. It certainly feels like a photo one could walk into, which is nice.

On the whole though, I think the primary shortcomings, the 'just because' tilt, the visual imbalance, the lack of a purpose to the subject make the photo fall a bit flat, in my opinion.

 

[TATTRAT]

No offense, but, it just seems like a "shot from the hip" kinda snapshot, imo.

 

[TATTRAT]

No offense, but, it just seems like a "shot from the hip" kinda snapshot, imo.

None taken, that's the feel I was going for here.

Ahhh, well awesome job then!

 

[The_Traveler]

Have you considered which side should face the wall?

(that's meant to be a joke but the smileys aren't working for me.)

 

[fjrabon]

When choosing a subject, they should generally be some combination of: beautiful, interesting or empathetic. This guy is neither, he looks extremely normal, so any sense of mystery because we can't see his face is killed. He isn't looking at us, so we lose the visual interest nearly all faces have, and there's nothing particularly beautiful about a man we can barely see.

Thanks for the feedback.

I think the points you raise concerning the choice of subject (which I have quoted from your post) are rather prescriptive.

Otherwise I agree with your points to a greater or lesser degree and appreciate the time you took. Food for thought.

I think it's important to try out new things (the tilt, the unexpected high contrast, etc.,) otherwise it's easy to get into a rut and developing new ideas is difficult. I decided to leave my comfort zone for a day or two.

Absolutely, I agree that if you never fail when taking photographs, you just aren't trying very hard. The only type of photography where I'm happy with my results over 90% of the time are simple yearbook pictures. I'd say about 90% of the stuff I post here are experiments on stuff that I have mixed feelings about the results.

When I first sort of came up with those three things to look for in a subject, I kept thinking there would be something else, some other aspect that I must have missed. Now granted a LOT can fit under the umbrella of "interesting", which is perhaps why it works so well, because it's so vague, but I've yet to really find a photograph that really works well where the subject isn't one or more of those 3 things. And those special moments when your subject manages all three qualities, wow. Those are rare, but those are the show stoppers.