Street Performer

[chex]

I'm new at this so be gentle ^^.

Critique on composition/exposure/B&W processing/anything at all very welcome.

[jasonrandolph]

Is this digital?  If so, you did an amazing job processing the image to look just like Tri-X.  Absolutely outstanding, right down to the grainy observers.  I like the composition.  For a street portrait, you seem to have captured the mood of the performer, and there is just enough detail in the audience that the eye moves around the image.  I like it.

[cmi]

He looks direct, a bit like evaluating you, but with a humorous touch. I like this! I like pictures with direct eyecontact. THe whole scene has a tension. On the other hand, for me this is a good tad to dark. That was my first immediate thought. What was your motivation to make it this way? Im asking in order to understand.

Christian

[chex]

Thanks Jason, B&W film is what I was going for ^^

Christian, my motivation was to make it look like a high contrast picture taken with a film camera - i love old B&W pictures...

I see your point about it being too dark, I'll try reprocess it and try to keep more detail in the performer...

[chex]

Here's a lighter version

[usathyan]

Here's a lighter version

Love the "lighter" version! Nice feel of film.

[RSL]

Yes, the "lighter" version is an improvement, and it's almost a good street shot. The only reason I don't call it a really good street shot is that I can't tell what he's doing. I think this is the kind of thing where you need to give the performer enough room so your viewers can see what his act is. There's a classic Andre Kertesz picture of a street performer standing on his head atop a pile of chairs  that illustrates this. The only link I can find at the moment is this: http://www.coldbacon.com/pics/kertesz/kert...ete-foraine.jpg. It's a pretty lousy copy, but it shows you what I'm suggesting.

But I'm always happy to see people doing street photography. It's my favorite variety of image. Keep it up.

[chex]

Ah good point. I have a few more that I haven't worked on yet that are shot wider.

In this particular shot he wasn't doing much of anything, I just waited for eye contact and squeezed ^^.

[Ed Blagden]

What Russ said about composition.  I too prefer the lighter version.  I would be very interested to know your processing workflow to get to this Tri-X type output.  I really like the result., and would love to know how you did it.

This is not a criticism, but in future would you mind terribly making your images a bit smaller?  Bandwidth is an issue where I live, and a 1MB+ file takes a while to load.  Max width 1200 pixels, max height 850, max size 500KB will do just fine.  You gain nothing in perceived image quality for screen viewing if you go any bigger than this.  In fact if you go bigger than a standard screen size you can actually make the image look worse, because most browsers try to down-res for viewing and are not very good at it.

Thanks for sharing though.

Ed

[Jeremy Roussak]

Here's a lighter version

The performer looks much better in the lighter version, but the penalty, in my view, is that the people in the background become more distracting. Could you perhaps combine the two?

Jeremy

[chex]

Hi Jeremy,

I had thought the same but I was short on time and just focused on the performer. Maybe over the weekend.

=)

[chex]

A contrast belended version!

[Jeremy Roussak]

A contrast belended version!

Best of the three!

Jeremy

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

Best of the three!

Jeremy

Agreed.