Lady at Glen Echo

Hi. I would like a critique of this shot. I am trying to expand my horizons by shooting "street scenes" of people I don't know. I have always been shy of doing this, but want to get over the fear by just doing. I just pretended that I was shooting something else, and while she wasn't looking took shots of her.

Some info:
-Shot RAW, no sharpening in ACR, converted to 16bit TIF
-Capture sharpening using edge masks in copy of green channel of duplicate file
-B+W conversion: two hue/saturation adjustment layers
-Crop to 8x10 @ 260 DPI
-Output sharpening: Unsharp mask: (about) 250%, .9, 2
-Convert to JPG, qual 10.

Questions:

1) Is that ethical-without asking her if she would mind?
2) How is the composition?
3) How is the B+W conversion?
4) How is the sharpening?

Original RAW:

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Questions:

1) Is that ethical-without asking her if she would mind?
2) How is the composition?
3) How is the B+W conversion?
4) How is the sharpening?

In my opinion:

1) Unless you photograph someone in questionable situation, doing something really stupid which the subject would find embrassing, it is ethical. For example, I do not think that there is anything wrong with this shot. On the contrary.

2) The composition in modified shot is much better than the original. Now the wall gives nice solid background, while in the original the empty space from top of the wall and up is distracting. In addition, cutting the left part of the original frame out, puts the subject almost exactly in the "point of power". Should I want to critisise something, perhaps I would have preferred if the legs were not cut out like in the converted shot (i.e. lower part of the frame). But that is just my opinion.

3) Not an expert in B&W conversions, but I think that the result is good.

4) I am wondering about sharpening. Perhaps 250% sounds a bit too much. I think that the front edge or her hat as well as her face are somewhat pixelated or somthing like that. I would have tried settings like 100-150%, 0.2-0.6 and 0. 250% sound quite extreme.

All in all, not bad at all.

Thanks for the helpful reply. Yes I also noticed that the face is a bit over sharpened, but have heard advice to the effect that you should over sharpen a little for print output. Any thoughts on that anyone?

Compositionwise, I couldn't get much closer without her realizing I was taking the shot. If I could do it again, I would have lowered the camera a little to get her face more in the bottom right third of the frame and not cut off her legs.

Regarding sharpening, I think you could do well to read this:

http://www.naturescape​s.net/122004/tg1204.ht​m

It explains how to do sharpening with unsharp mask and how to consider different types of images while doing so. Although not hard and fast rules, it is something to begin with. I think that two important things to consider with sharpening, is that 1) it is the last thing you do after all other adjustments are made and 2) to do with enough magnification to see when you begin to get halos in the picture. About oversharpening for prints, well, I do not do that and have been completely satisfied with photographic prints so far. However, I suppose this has a lot to do with the printing service you use (I do not do home prints, wherefore I cannot really help in that). In addition, there was quite a recent thread in this forum, where sharpening was discussed in detail.

Regarding getting close, getting the shots, when shooting photos with themes comparable to Glen Echo's lady, there are two methods. One is that to get in a situation where there is obvious photographic interest nearby and which you are not shooting. Then you just wait patiently, and sooner or later a chance will arise. To illustrate this, in the attached picture I took something like week ago (If we stay with the theme of older ladies). The "obvious interest" were the birds in the background. This allowed me to get in a position, where I could pretty easily get facial shots with sun in a decent postion. Sometimes people even look a bit embrassed when they notice that they got between you and "the interest" and show apolegitic gestures. You should probaply try this and see if it works. Another method is to use wide angle, as the lens is not obviously pointing to your subject. This, however, is not something that I have used too much, as I prefer the intimacy you can get with longer focal lengths. However, considering your equipment, perhaps this method would work for you.

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Ok. I tried less unsharp mask on the output. Here is the less sharp version with 150, .8, 0 as opposed to 250, 1, 2. Can some other people tell me which looks better? I think I actually like the more sharpened version...

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Why all the dead space above her head? As it is her head is centered in the frame horizontally. Had you had lowered the camera a little you would have eliminated the dead space, placed her head into the 'Golden Rectangle' AND not lopped off her right leg all at the same time!

benji

Thanks. I see what you mean. I was trying not to let her notice that I was shooting her, so I was pretending to shoot higher up

the crop is much better on second pic.. good try!