A holiday capture

[selig1656]

P1000414 edited by Raymond Friedman, on Flickr

[Manfred M]

Raymond - a similar comment to your previous image; the vignette is so heavy that it becomes a distraction / liability to the overall image. In most cases, once the viewer starts noticing the vignette, it is a sign that the photographer has gone too far.

[mugge]

I do like the picture. I agree, however with the heavy vignette.
Cheers Ole

[lunarbo]

I agree the vignette is a distraction. I believe that a portrait crop would enable you to come in close on the lighting on her hair and her lovely smile..... then the vignette question becomes unnecessary.

[DanK]

Raymond,

I agree with Manfred and Bo, but I'd like to suggest thinking about this more generally.

The first step toward doing that is composition. Don't include material in the frame unless it helps. There is no reason to have so much background here. It doesn't really contribute. That's why I agree with Bo and Manfred that both images should be cropped. I left the first one uncentered because the girl was facing viewer's left. I think I would leave this one slightly uncentered too, but that's a matter of taste.

Your vignette and blur were presumably intended to highlight the girl, but I agree with Manfred that they backfired because they were too extreme. I wouldn't go as far as Manfred and say that a vignette shouldn't be noticeable, but I would say that it shouldn't attract the viewer's attention. This does. As Bo wrote, you would need this less if you cropped. I would probably use some vignette even then because of the bright sky.

That leads to the third point: you can control the viewer's attention in part by controlling brightness.

What you want to do, I assume, is get the viewer's attention on the girl. For that reason, I would dodge the girl's face and burn the sky and perhaps some of the background on the side. That burning is essentially a vignette, but it would be tailored to the specifics of the image, rather than a standard circle or ellipse.

Dan

[Manfred M]

Well said Dan.

Let me add a few thoughts to compliment yours.

First of all, I agree 100% that a more general approach makes sense when analyzing and then post-processing an image. Raymond has 100% identified the issue with the image and that is that the distracting elements take away from the overall impact. Identifying the issue is just the start but knowing what to do about it is more challenging.

Often the easiest, but most challenging way to achieve no distractions can be achieved when the picture is taken. The bright railing and the bright sky are always going to be an issue; so not having them in the shot by changing the point of view would be a good start. The image was taken with a mFT camera at a 30mm focal length is going to give a relatively wide field of view but shooting at 60mm (120mm FF equivalent) would cut out some of the problem areas, leaving less to fix in the end. A portrait like this would normally be taken with a focal length of 40 - 60mm (FF equivalent of 80 to 120mm).

Another issue with the scene is that the background is quite bright; using fill flash is often an excellent way of shooting a scene like this. Proper exposure of the subject at the appropriate power setting will darken the background and brighten the subject, but like anything else this takes time and practice. The built-in flash on the camera should be something to try here.

Both these ideas are quick and easy and required no additional work in post.