color -- then and now After School Is Out**+ *@-j-c-n

After School Is Out, Oakland, California, is self-explanatory. Your

ratings and critiques are invited and most welcome. Please keep in

mind that this is a 'street photo' when rating. This photo is

a 'crop' from a 35mm photo. (If you rate harshly or very

negatively, please submit a helpful and constructive comment/Please

share your superior knowledge to help improve my photography.)

Thanks! Enjoy! ;-)) John

The only 'manipulation' this photo has had is a 'crop' and no more 'manipulation of color/brightness and slight sharpening than would ordinarily be performed by a photo finishing machine if such a computer-generated machine were making a print from film.

 

John

John, very good shoot. I like the kids hapiness that this photo capture. The composition is great.

Good composition.

i like you idea.try to give more life and colour to the background. the moment was very good with the children active and in the correct position.

As the photo notes, this is a 'crop'. I was shooting with a 35 mm format, and this is basically a 'square' presentation.

 

This presentation format was dictated by the crop and the subject matter, to best show off the composition.

 

The young boys were running down the street, and I wanted to catch them exactly where I caught them, just behind the feet of the piano player (pianist), and it was good shooting (I truly aim for mid-stride) to catch them mid-stride.

 

Notice the three pairs of split legs.

 

1. The two boys are mid-stride and their legs are thereby split.

 

2 The piano player, using the pedal, has his legs separated, too.

 

3. The three figures at the top, also are depicted mid-stride.

 

The effect is 3, 1, and 2 for the strides, an element I was aiming for as I chose this particular photo and in the cropping.

 

(I'm working on a presentation on showing legs 'mid-stride' to show forward motion, which is stalled until Photo.net upgrades its presentation software so I can properly edit it.)

 

Thanks for the nice comment.

 

John

Usually I compose entirely in the viewfinder.

 

Here I was confronted with a HUGE mural -- actually a series of murals, and I didn't know exactly from moment to moment what I would capture, and my composition was essentially in the 'limbic' portion of the brain, I think -- some prehistoric part of the brain that I have developed over years of viewing good photography that tells me to press the shutter, and when. (I only pressed the shutter once, that I can see from my proofs for these children.)

 

But I shot 'large' for this huge mural, to give myself room for composing in Photoshop, a luxury I usually do NOT give myself, being opposed to such shooting.

 

The original photo was not so well-composed exactly, primarily because I was less zoomed and the frame size was rectangular which did not suit this composition. If I had been shooting a square format camera, I hope I would have been able to compose this in the camera exactly . . . but who knows . . . ?

 

Thanks for the comment.

 

John

Antonios,

 

I have worked long and hard to develop the instincts to 'capture' subjects such as these children in such animation.

 

The mid-stride part, I wrote about above.

 

As far as their expressions, that was all up to them -- children will be children; I was lucky to capture that part of their playfulness, and I cannot take credit for anything other than having pressed the shutter at a good time.

 

Thanks for your thoughtful comment.

 

John

Another good one on this theme John..6/6..i can't find that finger pic u wanted me to see, can ya link me here? thanks.

John, good use of repeating patterns (ba da bump- my best drum interpretation). The split stride is also mimicked all over the place in the angles formed- bottom of the piano, red ribbon like object in the right top as well as the left top corner.

 

I like the capture and think in a print it is probably a bit more to look at - as here it is coming off strongly sharpened for lack of a better description.

Thanks for the kind rating. I'm particularly proud of this photo, even though it doesn't have the power of a previous photo (actually one taken subsequently by five frames but posted previously, called 'Wheelchair Dreams' last posted in this folder).

 

As to the photo I had referred you to, I can't recall a description of it, and it has slippped my mind which one, so I will require a better reference so I can give you a good reference to the folder and the folder name, or some better description of what I wrote you so that I can help you -- I'm always glad to oblige.

 

Glad you liked this one. I was pleasantly surprised as I went into pixel processing and image processing to see the possibilities of this one. This one actually required almost no work to bring it out other than cropping to the 'square format' and the slight contrast/brightening/slight sharpening adjustments as noted in the posting and first comment, as opposed to 'Wheelchair Dreams' which almost was unpostable because of the 'blur' of the wheelchair occupant in the previous post.

 

Let me know, will you, about a reference to that photo . . . .

 

John

I know that this photo looks like it's 'strongly sharpened' as you suggest, but in truth, it's not. It's sharpened a little, but not a lot, and certainly far less than the previous post (taken five frames later -- 'Wheelchair Dreams', which was slightly blurred for the wheelchair occupant).

 

Honest to gosh, this is minimally sharpened, using unsharp mask, but hardly sharpened at all. In many of my photos I don't sharpen at all, but when I sharpen I usually minimally sharpen unless it's to 'rescue' something and this certainly didn't require 'rescuing' at all.

 

I do have my Nikon D70,D2H and D2HS, all set to a more heavily saturated 'custom setting' and it's set to a more heavily 'sharpened' setting in the camera, so perhaps that's the culprit, but I did that in response to the appearance of softer images, and have generally been pleased with the results.

 

(And I almost never touch 'saturation' command in Photoshop, and have even forgot where it's located -- it often results in 'color casts' that I find objectionable or unnatural, and I dislike having to 'tweak' out colors that 'saturation' has added unnaturally.

 

Natural is best.

 

As to the rest of your comment: I am smiling. (You forgot a rim shot after your drum roll). Yes, I agree, the 'split image' repetition theme redounds here, and it's one of those wonderful things that sometimes happens with photographs -- the photographer doesn't plan on it and it just appears.

 

However, I did help.

 

In the uncropped version, the above legs were connected to bodies that had crossed arms, which I felt were not helpful to the theme of the split leg theme, and I did help the 'split legs' theme by cropping at that particular point.

 

(It may be that the 'sharpened' effect may be because of the 'cropping'. As you know I seldom post 'crops' and certainly don't shoot to crop later, but in this case it was appropriate to crop for clarity, and I don't have objections to cropping where it works well.

 

Thanks for stopping by to comment. (Saw your private post, and yes, I may have to mop floors too . . . I say mysteriously . . . ).

 

Please stop by whenever you have the time.

 

John

I think I know why it looks so sharpened.

 

The young boys, I think, are what you are focusing on as looking 'sharpened'.

 

What you are confusing as 'sharpened' is actually the difference between the faded, washed out and somewhat aged mural behind them with its muted colors and the sharpness of the boys themselves which really stands out.

 

Sharpening depends on increasing contrast between light and dark 'edges', but here the figures are 'blown up' a little, and the sharpness of the boys with their brighter colors and sharper lines stands in contrast to the faded, aged mural behind them.

 

Perhaps the 'sharpened' appearance of this photo is just an artifact of the contrast between the boys, more foreground' and the slightly blurry and faded background?

 

John

 

(Looks like Blagoy has said you don't have to mop floors).

 

 

I think you are right regarding the differences of the boys and the background mural causing the sharpened look.

 

as for cropping sometimes, it just works and sometimes it just doesnt...kinda like adding salt in a recipe. In this case it works. You certainly got lucky with the kids as the hair color of the one boy couldnt fit any better if you tried.

 

I am glad not to mopping floors today.

John...we get mixed up lol. You were referring to a pic of a fat women gave u "the finger"...said it was in single photos...i looked for longtime couldn't find it... anyhow i posted this to show u what a really bad photographer gets... http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=3234852 ... when u get to it leave the link to that women on that pic..thanks John!

Although I normally eschew cropping, this photo is a triumph of proper cropping. There was much extraneous about this photo, including a little street at the bottom, a little too much mural at the top, and too much at the right (the left was OK, but cropped too, I think, just for dimension).

 

I used to be a photo editor, and although I generally won't crop to save my soul, except for minor crops to delete something very distracting like a nose from a passerby sticking into a frame of a street photo or a passing car intruding onto a scene, sometimes a crop is proper.

 

This scene was far too large to determine in advance how to compose for passersby because one could not determine how or when the passersby would appear between holes in the everpresent traffic.

 

So, when passersby appeared, there was a rush to shoot 'large' amid the holes in the traffic, then hope to make a better picture of it from the various agglomerations of murals that made up this huge background.

 

Looks like I caught these boys just about right -- in fact I couldn't have caught them better, and composed for them on the spot for this capture, but it caused too much to be included, but cropping took care of that, including altering the aspect ratio of the photograph (the ratio of length to width -- or vice versa -- in any case, the shape of the box in which the photograph is displayed.)

 

John

The threes, a repeated element in my photography, are shown here in 'split legs'. Here the two boys' split legs are repeated in those of the piano player (pianist) for three pairs of split legs.

 

Those are echoed by the three pairs of split legs at the top of the photo.

 

I don't plan my photos (usually) for these things, they just turn out that way, sometimes.

 

Sometimes an element will be twos or fours -- it all depends.

 

John

These boys are NOT going home to play piano.

 

John ;~))