Traditional Mennonite Boy at the St Jacobs Market

[Manfred M]

Traditional Mennonites have settled in areas near St Jacobs and Elmira, Ontario, Canada; just over 100 km / 60 mi west of Toronto. They farm, do not use electricity, drive around in horse drawn carriages and dress in traditional black clothing; the men wearing hats and the women in their bonnets.

One of the best places to see them is at the St Jacobs Market. They set up their stands to sell their goods. They tend to not want to have their pictures taken so I took this one with a long lens about three years ago. I reworked it a bit today and thought I would post it. This boy was selling maple syrup at the family stand; the horses and buggy are in the shadows just to the right of the image.

I felt that a style that reminds me of the old Dutch masters would be a nice interpretation of this scene.

[Brownbear]

a beautiful image...

[Digital]

This is a very nice photograph. Bruce

[Mike Buckley]

If there is something not to like about it, I can't imagine what that would be.

[rpcrowe]

He has an almost angelic look about him...

[Karm Redland]

Manfred, nice image.

Karm

[Donald]

Beautifully processed. The lighting is wonderful and all our attention is directed towards the boy's face, before we can they look around the scene.

[Marie Hass]

I love the composition and the color palate in this image, but.....have you considered black and white?

Just for academic purposes.......

Marie

[casper]

hi Manfred,
Nice edit, did it differ much from the original? As Donald has said, all attention is focussed on the young man's face. If he was oblivious of your presence, he has provided you with a great candid "pose". Thank you for the accompanying cultural information, which prompted me to "Google" further. I now know that their origins go back to the 16th century, which makes the style of their contemporaries, the Dutch masters, very appropriate.
- Noel

[Manfred M]

I love the composition and the color palate in this image, but.....have you considered black and white?

Just for academic purposes.......

Marie

Actually Marie, I did come up with two different B&W versions as I was not happy with the slightly bluish tint on the heavy maple syrup jugs in the background. I worked on two different B&W versions, but ultimately went back to the colour.

A more normal B&W version:






And a more faded looking, sepia print version (this uses a Nik filter I really like using on older looking shots right now). A do get into stylistic phases..

[Manfred M]

hi Manfred,
Nice edit, did it differ much from the original? As Donald has said, all attention is focussed on the young man's face. If he was oblivious of your presence, he has provided you with a great candid "pose". Thank you for the accompanying cultural information, which prompted me to "Google" further. I now know that their origins go back to the 16th century, which makes the style of their contemporaries, the Dutch masters, very appropriate.
- Noel

Hi Noel - This was actually a fairly major re-edit. It was taken in early spring, during a time of year that is frequently overcast and rainy. I had nice, but boring diffuse lighting to work with. The St Jacobs Market is very, very busy and this was Easter weekend so it was insanely busy. so getting and maintaining a good line of sight with a 400mm setting on a crop D90 camera was challanging. The boy spent a lot of time behind the support, just partially peeking out. and when he finally stepped forward; I got him.

After that it was some heavy duty remanufacturing in Photoshop. Much more than the usual cropping (which happened as well). Like I said, the lighting did not work, so some directed light via gradient masks and vignettes helped direct the light to where it was needed. I also had to do a bit of surgery; there was another figure in the background that had to go, and he was in front of the picture frame, so that had to be rebuilt as well. Lots of masking and layers of cloning with corrections with layer masks. I probably spent a good 30 minutes on this image.

Here is the original file I started with; right after I finished with it in ACR. I recognized it as one of those "diamonds in the rough" that would take a fair bit of work to bring out the potential of the image.

[Manfred M]

Beautifully processed. The lighting is wonderful and all our attention is directed towards the boy's face, before we can they look around the scene.

Thanks Donald; that was exactly what I was trying to do. A vignette and layer mask with the Photoshop gradient tool can put directed lighting someplace where there really isn't any. I just wish that Adobe had a tool like the modify selection command for layer masks. There is too much trial and error with the current tool.

[Donald]

The original shows us just what an excellent piece of post-processing work it was. Hopefully will help everyone who wonders why we talk about pressing the shutter just being the end of the first part of image-making.