The Spirit of Audrey Hepburn

[Vaske_Obsidiann]

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

 

[The_Traveler]

What pops out at me in this photo is the dress rather than the woman.
The pattern is so strong and large in the frame and her face so delicate and relatively small in the frame that the dress just overwhelms my eye.

I think that her head and neck need to be relatively larger in the frame in order to make an impression.

 

[Joel_W]

Traveler, I like your crop for the same reasons, but why are you cutting off her left arm? I would have preferred to have it as the edge of the photograph.

 

[The_Traveler]

Traveler, I like your crop for the same reasons, but why are you cutting off her left arm? I would have preferred to have it as the edge of the photograph.

De gustibus non disputandum est

I had no specific reason, just tried to get the head and face in what seemed like a good place.
She has that beautiful elfin face but maybe needs to be a bit more sculptured to carry this image. It is so light that it almost fades away.

Lew

 

[Derrel]

What pops out at me in this photo is the dress rather than the woman.
The pattern is so strong and large in the frame and her face so delicate and relatively small in the frame that the dress just overwhelms my eye.

I think that her head and neck need to be relatively larger in the frame in order to make an impression.

The crop creates what is known as a "gutter", that leads the eye right down and out of the image. The original photo's composition follows solid portraiture fundamentals, with the dress forming a "base" that goes across the frame at the bottom; that visual base visually "supports" her torso, and by comparison, shows how slender she is; if the dress is cropped off, and white space fills the entire right hand side of the frame, the image looks a bit odd. Try cropping out the remainder of the frame, down to JUST the cropped area, and one can see that she appears to be,well, just sort of "floating". Viewing the image whole, but with a screened out area is deceptive, and doesn't really reflect the way the image would look when actually cropped fully. I do not agree that the suggested crop is a good idea. The original pose is a seated pose, and it makes sense; the crop is just a crop, and is not a very good result.

See the "gutter" created by cropping off the bottom part of a well-balance, well-conceived seated pose? Sometimes the original concept is best left as it was conceived. Not always, but in this case, the crop makes for a very poor pose.

 

[Joel_W]

Derrel, I understand what you're saying. I agreed with the concept of the crop because the head should be the main focus. When I looked at the original, my eyes wandered along her mid section, not directly towards her head. I'm by no means a portrait photographer, actually, I rarely shoot any pictures of people, so my view is that of someone with practically no photographic knowledge of what should be, rather what just appeals to me.

 

[The_Traveler]

I wasn't saying that the crop made a perfect portrait shot but only that the patterned dress is so bold as to pull the viewer's eye from the face to the dress and that to work with this patterned dress, the head and face need to be larger in the frame.