Sorry, this one is not working well for me. Your walker is so overwhelmed by the surroundings that he ends up being more of a distraction than a significant element in the shot.
Hi Manfred. That's kind of how Is felt initially. That why I made a tight crop. But I found it and other crops uninteresting. I think I was taken by the pre corona-19 city scene. I do miss it. Thank you
I think I would try just a slight crop from the top and right side.
In many ways I find the lone walker against a busy background makes an interesting scene.
I agree with Manfred. I think it might look better, if you have extra on the bottom, not to crop off the man's legs. The cropping makes him a less significant part of the scene.
One reason I agree with Manfred's comment is that you have very high contrast in the scene (large areas in which shadows have been crushed to pure blacks, and whites up to 98 of 100 in luminosity), with far less contrast and tonal range on the person, which makes him not stand out by comparison. If it were mine, I wouldn't crank up the contrast so high. But given the image as it is, I think I would try two changes: first, crop off the nearly empty space at the top, which doesn't really contribute and draws the eye away from the man, and second, darken the man to nearly a silhouette so that he attracts the eye by contrast to the surroundings. Maybe something like this:
I love the intensity of the image, but my eye is drawn to the bright image of the lady in the poster in the background rather than the walker. It is a very busy image. Maybe crop the image horizontally at the top of the louvres (US flag?) and crop out the silver bollard on the right hand side of the image at about the rear door handle of the car. Retain the detail in the walker.
I prefer to see more of the walker. I did do some silhouettes from other photos' in this series. Ultimately I agree with Manfred that the image doesn't work. But that does not mean that there are not elements in the image that make it interesting to some viewers. Actually the second image is starting to work a bit for me. Thank you all for looking and commenting.
[IMG]IMG_6643-2 by pongo now, on Flickr[/IMG]
Martin, If I crop to the top of the flag you loose a lot of the intensity, but it does put the focus on the walker.
Daniel, one thought would be to both reduce all the contrast outside of the figure and blur it up with quite a large radius.
Had there been some foreground and the whole figure, another would be to deliberately transform the image into a lenticular look so as to retain the figure much larger but with all of it's surroundings diminished.
Exaggerated as usual ...
Last edited by xpatUSA; 28th September 2020 at 08:24 PM.
You're welcome, Daniel.
I use the GIMP and was able to select around the figure then invert the selection so as to work on the rest of the image seperately. I used Gaussian blur somewhere near 2 or 3px radius, amount to taste.
The GIMP has a stack of filters -one of which is a lens effect. You select an ellipse or circle, then apply the effect.
Hoping one of your apps can do similar ...