McDonald's

[RSL]

Over on the west coast of Florida earlier this week. Had lunch in McDonald's and saw this kid doing some serious studying. The colored tiles on the wall are too important to lose, but the B&W conversion puts more emphasis on the boy.

[Bryan Conner]

I like both.  I am leaning a bit towards the color version.

The image would be more pleasing if you would have moved the chair......OK.....just kidding.... ,  I am waiting anxiously for someone to suggest this though.  Actually, I am waiting on your response to the one that suggests it....

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... The image would be more pleasing if you would have moved the chair... I am waiting anxiously for someone to suggest this...

More than happy to oblige Chair gone (pardon the visual pun)!

P.S. On a more serious note, kudos to the kid! If that is what the young generation is doing in McDonald's these days, not everything is lost.

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

Why don't you crop out the boy and just leave the colored tiles... (Just kidding!)

I like them both, too, but I find I prefer the B&W, for at least a couple of reasons. One is that most of the "greats" of street photography have used B&W, so I'm conditioned to respect it more than I do color. The second is that your BW conversion has separated the color tiles very nicely, so I don't think they need the color to work well in the scene.

And I agree with Slobodan: It's a pleasure to see a young kid actually studying, whether in McDonald's or elsewhere.

[RSL]

Thanks, Slobodan. The chair's gone and so is the picture.

Great to hear from you, though. You too, Eric.

Yeah. I thought the same thing. First time I've seen anything like that in a McDonald's. I was sitting across from him through lunch -- in fact I shot the picture from where I was sitting, with the equivalent of a 50mm -- and he was deep into whatever he was working on the whole time.

[popnfresh]

For me it's all about the nose. So I took the liberty of getting rid of all that extraneous stuff.

[Dave (Isle of Skye)]

I never knew a nose when cropped and enlarged, would look vaguely like a vasectomy prepared scrotum - urgh!

Dave

[Tony Jay]

I never knew a nose when cropped and enlarged, would look vaguely like a vasectomy prepared scrotum - urgh!

You know what a vasectomy prepared scrotum looks like??

Regards

Tony Jay

[Rob C]

You know what a vasectomy prepared scrotum looks like??

Regards

Tony Jay

Tony, everybody does: it's self-retracted upwards and back and out of sight in the best immitation of a Barbie Doll that one can imagine. At least mine would be, were it ever under such threat.

I wonder what came first - the nose, the op. or the need? Such deep questions for breakfast.

Rob C

[seamus finn]

Russ, I pefer the B/W - it's about the boy, not the colour, I think.

-Seamus

[RSL]

I agree, Seamus. It was the B&W that I printed.

[Dave (Isle of Skye)]

You know what a vasectomy prepared scrotum looks like??

Regards

Tony Jay

Yes I am afraid I do and it looks like the last plucked chicken hanging on the rack 

Dave

[Dave (Isle of Skye)]

Over on the west coast of Florida earlier this week. Had lunch in McDonald's and saw this kid doing some serious studying. The colored tiles on the wall are too important to lose, but the B&W conversion puts more emphasis on the boy.

Hi Russ,

The B/W version is very much the better of the two and I especially like how you have worked it, although I am a little bit distracted by the protruding back of the foreground chair, but I also know you have to shoot it as you see it and I assume there was nothing you could do to avoid that, without giving the game away of course.

Nice work!

Dave

[RSL]

Thanks, Dave. Let's talk about the chair: I was in a booth. You can visualize how far away I was by thinking 50mm lens, which is what I made the shot with. Actually I probably could have moved the chair. I could have pretended we were expecting somebody else to join us and moved the chair to the end of our booth's table. The kid was so absorbed in his work he'd probably hardly have looked up. But it was that absorption I wanted to capture, and I felt, and still feel, that the chair adds to the feeling that this kid is in his own world, isolated from the world around him -- a world filled with dinging bells, buzzers, people milling about, and kids running in and out of Ronald's playhouse. I've never seen anything quite like this kid in a McDonald's.

[Dave (Isle of Skye)]

Hi Russ,

I totally agree, the shot is 'in the moment' and is really good.

I suppose my and everyone else’s nit picking in this forum, is due to us all being dedicated/addicted to photography, so we are bound to look for and see things that your average Joe would not. Hence my comments some time ago in a previous thread, that comments on our work from other Lu-La 'perfectionists' is possibly not always the best way to evaluate the true merit of the work, as it would be appreciated or otherwise by the general public.

Dave

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

I just played around (in my mind) with the BW version. First, I removed the chair, which immediately destroyed the balance of the image.
Then I put it back and looked around some more.

Some of my discoveries included the way the "colored" squares are echoed by the menus on the wall behind them, and the stripe near the floor below the squares, and the windows. Almost everything in the background is rectangles and straight lines.

Then I noticed that the only rounded objects in the scene are the boy's head, the back of his chair, the back of the empty chair in front, and the small coil of wire in the background. The effect, for me, is to tie these elements together, and the empty chair really emphasizes what Russ said: That the boy was in his own world.

Then, for the first time, I noticed the little word "gone" just above the boy's head! Wow!

This now works for me on so many different levels. I really like images that give me something more each time I look at them. This one is right up there with the best, IMHO.

Nice work, Russ!

Eric

[Rob C]

Hi Russ,

I totally agree, the shot is 'in the moment' and is really good.

I suppose my and everyone else’s nit picking in this forum, is due to us all being dedicated/addicted to photography, so we are bound to look for and see things that your average Joe would not. Hence my comments some time ago in a previous thread, that comments on our work from other Lu-La 'perfectionists' is possibly not always the best way to evaluate the true merit of the work, as it would be appreciated or otherwise by the general public.

Dave

Wow! That’s a difficult one Dave.

My experience has been that the more ‘dedicated/addicted” we become, then the more blinded we also seem to be.

I have found that women with no personal interest in the medium are often very capable of seeing things that we dedicated addicts don’t. A case in point was my mo’n’lo: she could pick Playboy (in the nice, 60s/early 70s era) up off the table and instantly spot the four or five shots that I would find myself raving about (never centrefolds). My wife could do much the same, but not quite as consistently because, probably, she already knew too much about both photography and me.

I have a shot of a model in a wooded glade with some largish rocks behind her; for years I saw the shot as the shot, until one day my wife pointed out that the rocks resembled a monster. From that day on, I never again saw rocks – just a  monster.

Oh well, boing! goes another image.

Rob C

[Dave (Isle of Skye)]

Wow! That’s a difficult one Dave.

My experience has been that the more ‘dedicated/addicted” we become, then the more blinded we also seem to be.

I have found that women with no personal interest in the medium are often very capable of seeing things that we dedicated addicts don’t. A case in point was my mo’n’lo: she could pick Playboy (in the nice, 60s/early 70s era) up off the table and instantly spot the four or five shots that I would find myself raving about (never centrefolds). My wife could do much the same, but not quite as consistently because, probably, she already knew too much about both photography and me.

I have a shot of a model in a wooded glade with some largish rocks behind her; for years I saw the shot as the shot, until one day my wife pointed out that the rocks resembled a monster. From that day on, I never again saw rocks – just a  monster.

Oh well, boing! goes another image.

Rob C

Yes Rob I totally agree, the more we do this, the more we become blinded by the obvious and attuned to the trivial - in other words, I instantly noticed the foreground chair, yet I probably would not have noticed if the kid had three eyes..

Dave

[pete1959]

The chair in the foreground adds depth...I think its a plus....moving it would have flattened out the image into 2d.

I prefer the color version only because the b&w doesn't seem as well post processed...a bit noisy...not grainy...more noisy.

I have learned to take the shot asap....efforts ro remove distracting elements is a recipe for missing a shot....take the shot...get it in the bag....then adjust from there...usually the shot will be lost as soon as any effort is made to adjust elements...but at least you will have the original images if the subject changes. Once I lock in on an image it seems within a few seconds humans pick up on something pretty quickly and become "aware".....spoiling the shot....the watering hole phenomenon...too much getting eaten by lions in our genetic past.

Nice image...which in 50 years will be timeless.

Regards,
Peter

Www.tmaxphoto.com