Lalibella Saturday market, Ethiopia

This photo was taken with a Canon EOS 3000 SLR on Ektachrome E100

VS slide film in Lalibella, Ethiopia. It shows the hectic town market. The

colours of the green hills and blue skies have been saturated slightly as

the original picture was somewhat bleached. I am quite interested in

feedback on this one especially on composition as I'm undecided if there

is a certain balance to the crowd or if it comes across as a dog's

breakfast of hectic activity.

Cory, you are asking about balance. As far as weight, IMO, it seems balanced enough. As far as visual balance the two umbrellas handle that fairly well—they are anomaly, the broken pattern and therefore are very strong visually. I would love to see the dark unidentifiable object in the lower right removed but that would remove the red umbrella. It is difficult to tell from the photograph exactly what you want the viewer to concentrate on. There are only two areas of color contrast in the crowd, the man in the white outfit and red hat and the woman near the front in the green shawl holding the bright blue object. Because of his placement the man in the red hat seems to be, after the umbrellas, the predominate object in the crowd. However, neither really competes satisfactorily with the contrast in the sky. Faces, which are normally the important part of a figure are pretty much obscured, some totally, which leaves clothing as the most important element of the figures. As far as “market” the photograph says large crowd of people but there is not enough evidence of the market place to really draw that inference from what is within the frame of the photograph. The sky area is given about the same amount of real estate in your photograph as the people so it is somewhat difficult to know whether you are showing the viewer the people or the clouds. Cropping down to just above the tops of the hills would, IMO, greatly improve the format of the photograph and place more of the attention on the crowd of people. All are opinions, nothing carved in stone.

this is such a great documentary photo!

The people in the foreground and the mountains and wide landscape in the background are completing each other very well.