Finding their way

[RBSinTo]

Taken a few years ago during a street festival here in downtown Toronto.
I noticed a couple standing in a Toronto Transit Commission bus shelter, trying to find their route on the transit map, and liking the story, grabbed this shot.
Nikon S3 rangefinder
Nikon 35 1.8 in Nikon s mount manual focus
Fuji 100 ISO colour slide
5.6 @ 1/125th

[DanK]

A nice image, but I think it has a few issues, some easily fixed.

The easiest: I would crop away the edge on the right, where the glass ends. It's bright and a distraction.

Second, I would bring up the shadows a little. You are losing shadow detail.

The third is the hard one. This is cropped very tightly at the bottom (nothing one can do about that) and has a lot of space over the tops of their heads. This feels unbalanced. However, I am not sure what I would do with this. Cropping the top loses "Euclid Avenue", which I suspect you wanted.

For what it's worth, here's a quick version of these three changes:

[RBSinTo]

Dan,
Thanks for the comments and suggestions.
I appreciate the crop you suggested, and in fact considered making it, but chose not to because I felt the additional slice helped to show (or explain) that the couple was under a glass kiosk. However, to me the composition works with either crop.

I'm often criticized for producing images that are too dark or lack shadow detail, probably because everything I shot up to about eighteen months ago was colour slide, and virtually all of that was 100 ISO. I was taught to expose for the highlights, and under-expose by about 1/3 stop to saturate the colours.
Having said this, I understand and appreciate your bringing out the shadow detail, but in the case of this particular photo, I don't see that it improves the story.
Robert