douglas k.

This picture does not give me "the complete story." Without the text, I did not know that this was shot at a flea market; hence I am unsure of the photo's point, of what it is trying to communicate. Is it an environmental portrait? Well, I can't really see an environment that enhances the photo. Is it a portrait? Well, if so, I'd like to see her eyes, which are obscured by those large glasses frames and the shooting angle. In the end, it appears as a grab shot of someone the photog came across and engaged in conversation; a nice shot, something I would definitely print, but not much more. I'm not sure that this would make it onto my wall or into a show.

This photo illustrates one of the major challenges of street shooting: taking random, slice-of-life events and turning them into meaningful compositions. Many beginners seem to think that merely having the guts to point a camera at a stranger qualifies them as street photographers, even though it often takes little guts and the results are often photographically pointless. (Witness the many photos, often posted to the Leica Forum with great pride, of helpless -- sometimes literally physically helpless -- street people.) But while it takes some practice to become comfortable photographing strangers in the business of their lives, that alone is not enough: the photo still must convey some message, display an interesting relation among compositional elements, etc. This photo fails to do that.

Technically fine. Aesthetically I would rather see the framing moved rightward, so we would have less dark space on the left and actually see the whole area framed by the arch. But I suppose the framing is, in this case, the photographer's only way of injecting a tiny bit of originality into a landscape feature that has been photographed to death. The Canyonlands NP visitor's centers and the Moab gift shops are chock full of nice pictures of Mesa Arch.