bradford_daly

as for your question, use a wider lens and move in closer for the foreground/background relationship you want.

the image is much better in black and white than in color. there's no color contrast in the color version.

what a terrific photo. thanks for sharing. could you share with us some details on how you did it.

--brad daly

oh, come on. we can read that photo however we want. perhaps the giant girl is looking away because she's embarrassed by the piper's horrible noise, or she thinks he's cute and is being flirty, or she sees something interesting down the road, like an angry mob coming to kill the piper, or margaret thatcher naked on a cold day. . . .

hi jeff,

what a great subject. i LOVE stuff like this, and, as a resident if birmingham, alabama, i'm always jealous of people who have easy access to desert, which is the most photographable type of landscape on earth.

i'm very impressed with the amount of detail your digital camera captured. i don't to any digital *picture-taking*, so some of my comments below may not be germain. please take them with as many grains of salt as necessary. i'm assuming you manipulated this image with photoshop, which is good.

the first thing i would do is crop this image differently. i'm a fan of square cropping, the good old 1:1 medium format aspect ratio. i might crop it square so that only the central knot is visible. having said that, i would add that i also like extremely wide 2.35:1 panavision-style cropping, which might look really nice with this image because it has such a strong horizontal quality. i find the empty area both above and below the piece of wood a bit distracting.

compositionally, i might try--and this could be difficult without going all the way out to the desert again--to skew the image more diagonally. it's a bit static and overly horizontal--horizontality is also one of this image's strong points. giving it a strong diagonal aspect might really make it more dynamic.

i would also suggest some dodging and burning. as a rule--in my opinion, of course--the corners of images almost always need burning in. (of course, it's always best to break rules when you can.) i might also burn in the curved highlight area about 1/3 of the way in from the left-hand side. i'd also suggest dodging the shadow on the right-hand side just a little bit.

the rest of your portfolio is very impressive, especially "angel," which is the kind of image that gives me a pang of envy: i wish i'd taken it. it's just an incredible image. "trimetro" and "tumor" are also very, very good. "fossil" is impressive. i'm glad to see i'm not the only photographer who likes to take pictures of dead animals.

anyhow, thanks very much for sharing these images. they're very impressive and inspirational to us all. i'm glad to see others doing such impressive work with digital cameras.

best,

brad daly

nigel et al,

i respectfully disagree that this is a less-than-perfect composition. i find it extremely compelling, conveying a great deal of the woman's personality. the hand hiding her mouth betrays her shyness, while her smiling eyes reveal her pride and pleasure at the attention you're paying her by taking her photograph. my only suggestion would be to crop it so that her right wrist isn't showing at the bottom of the frame. a square composition might be nice.

the color, also, is incredible--really the reason color film exists.

i also enjoyed the rest of your portfolio. my only negative criticism is that some of the images--all of which you have posted full-frame--need to be cropped. "jaipur city palace 1," for instance, would be very effective as a square composition. "jaipur hal mahal" would look really nice in a 2.35:1 panavision aspect ratio. i'd just suggest playing around with cropping in general. good images can often be made great images with cropping.

best,

brad daly