Mother and son resting

[Manfred M]

I'm slowly working my way through some more of my images from our recent trip to Guatemala. I caught this shot of a mother and son resting in the shade. The boy noticed me and hid behind his mother, so I just hung around across the street until he started to ignore me, which is when I took this shot.

[IzzieK]

Very nice, Manfred -- just enough texture and sharpness. I partiularly like the leaves of (?) with its limited backlights and the natural expressions of your subjects. Did you use your D800 for this shot?

[Manfred M]

Thanks Isabel - yes; D800, battery grip and Nikkor f/2.8 70-200mm lens. Not exactly the stealth setup most people recommend for street photography; but "hiding in plain sight" seemed to work out well for me.

[travis4567]

Very nice Manfred. Personally, I would have made it a little softer.

[Mike Buckley]

Nice handling of such high-contrast light.

[FootLoose]

I like this family portrait, Manfred. The expression on the little boy's face is priceless. That would have been a great shot on its own.

Is there anything you can do to tone down the harsh light on the leaves?

[Shadowman]

Nicely done, wonder what she's waiting for?

[Jim35010]

Really nice photo. Almost looks like a posed shot. The "leaves" are blades from corn, I assume she would use those in cooking. The boy seems to be very aware of the surroundings, and keeping an eye on you. Great color and contrast at first I thought the aqua color behind her right shoulder was a reflection, but you can see it behind the boy and on the door facing.
Jim

[Manfred M]

Thanks for the thoughts and comments. I'd like to respond to some of them.

Travis - the sharpening effect is an unfortunate reality. I output sharpen at 100% when I post to Flickr. I don't display full-sized images when I post the links to my Flickr images, so the downsampling; this image is 791 x 1024 pixels, while the original is 5100 x 6600 pixels. This is unfortunately happens I can't control anything other than my original
uploaded image.

Greg - I actually prefer the image with the blown out specular highlights on the leaves. With two people in the image, the eyes tend to be drawn between the two figures. By having a bright spot (that really pretty well flows down the woman's arm, the eyes are drawn to the bright area and ties the two people together).

The image at the end of this paragraph shows the toned down leaves (thanks to the dynamic range, only a very tiny part of the actual material appears to be blown out).

Jim - one thing I really liked (and something I took a lot of pictures of) is the patina on the painted walls all over town (and frankly in many of the towns) ; there are all kinds of beautiful colours that appear from years of painting and weathering; so you are quite right, there is a hint of blue showing through the white paint. I went around just taking pictures of the patina for the archives (and to use in some of my work). An example of this is also shown below.


Mother and son - reduced highlights on leaves:




Example of a wall showing the impact of sun and weathering:

[deetheturk]

Great image Manfred,well captured!

[jamn4ex]

yes I really like the colors here.