What would you do to this?

I took this pic of mail trucks... I was having a hard time editing it becasue of the yellow light on the mail trucks that I didn't want.
So I turned it into a B&W and cropped it.

Any sugestions on what to do?
What you would have done?
Or if you like how it is?

Thanks a bunch,
Seth

I don't know what you've cropped out, but you've left a lot of dead space in the foreground. I'd get rid of that.

The lighting is a bit harsh. Are the trucks blown out? If not, I'd lower the exposure (or highlights) to reduce the high contrast glare and bring out some detail in them. Playing with curves might introduce some nicer tonality, and you could try the different colour filters to see the effect. Considering what you say about the yellow colour, the yellow filter might have an interesting effect.

I agree, the crop is wrong. Too much dead space in front. Ideally you would frame of so the tracks angled from bottom right to top left but I would imagine that would require a reshoot.

Agreed; I'd crop up to the tires of the foremost truck and make it a sort of panoramic framing. Also, pulling your highlights down to reduce the harshness of the light on the trucks would help. If you wanted the color, you could probably easily cool the image off if the light was too yellow...although, I'm guessing the red/white/blue of the trucks would be a bit of a color riot.

Also, it looks more sepia to me than B&W...making it more high contrast might give it some pop.

Thank for all the help...

I left the space underneath for writing. I was taking this photo for stock.

If you think it will still be better cropped I'll do that.

I'll try your sugestions and see how it works.
Thanks again!
Seth

I don't do stock shooting, so I don't know what that market looks for, but to me this image has too much "noise" in it to likely be much of a seller. The shadows across the trucks, the harsh lighting, the trees/foliage, lack of symmetry on how the trucks parked, etc all sort of compete for attention in the image. From what I've seen of most stock usage, they need a fairly clean frame that doesn't complete with the main subject. Besides, graphics can use about anything to add a border/text space to go along with the base image, so is leaving empty space in the image itself something that's really necessary (legit question, I really don't know)?

Great points.. thanks for the down to earth reply.

I appreciate it when people don't try to be to nice, you don't have to be mean, but just give the facts and what you think.

Thank you all for your imput... i'm going to try it.

If I think it looks good enough after I'll post another pic.

Thanks again,
Seth

What do you mean by stock?

Were you planning of selling the image to a stock photo website?

I dont think this image is worth worrying about fixing with a different crop or post prossessing. Just go out and shoot more images.

That's not enough, think and see before you squeeze that shutter.

^^^^
Right you are!