Selective processing and prominence

Two of my favourite people images - originals first and two alternatives.

 I can see the eye in the original, but wanted to highlight it a bot and get the "effect" of his gaze. The edited colour version is a lot better than the original, but for the monochrome works the best

 The young girls expression is challenging, even in the original, but by highlighting and making the eye more prominent it helps to "understand" her gaze. The portrait crop helps push that even more.

Just Looking

I took a lot of pictures of people during my time in Italy and these shots are from Lake Garda and Verona. I have edited these to depict people who have seen what I am doing and have visually confronted me. I find them very interesting. I have purposely not done any editing on these shots, the contrast was very high - almost too high  - but I tried to expose for the light in which the subjects appeared and didn't worry too much about the background lighting which is sometimes quite bright. The darker backgrounds work better in overall exposure terms, but this isn't about that it is about expression and how people react.

Bolzano anonymous

Close by the railway station in Bolzano is the Parco Statione; it is at a crossroads for people toing and froing to the station as well as in and out of the town centre. The good people of this town had thought to place seats by the side of the paths which provided some good vantage points to collect some people shots. I had several goes at this exercise and I particularly liked this set - which I have included here in its entirety. It was overcast but bright and with the film speed set at ISO400 and the aperture wide open at either f2 or f2.8 there was sufficient blur to render the subjects recognisable only people but not as particular individuals.

I quite like this set, the apparent mistakes in the early shots also have an appeal. The blur is sufficient in most cases to make the subject difficult or impossible to recognise and the background is sharp enough (in most cases!) despite being hand held with shutter speeds from 1/15th sec to 1/125th

Passing the Olympic flame

It was Woodstock's day today (amongst some other towns and villages in North Oxfordshire) where the Olympic torch was run through the town to throngs of people. Our local MP, Dave, came to cheer us all along (together with a few security folks). I positioned myself close to where the changeover was about to take place and where Dave would meet the flame carriers. Generally a happy occasion, with its fair share of hawkers - I am guilty of tussling with the press who wanted their own shots of our great leader and took it as a challenge to get as near as possible. I add no commentary to these pictures - I wanted to take people in a busy situation, get them face on as well interesting poses. More of us at play. A couple of people as accent and anonymous, these shouldn't be too difficult to spot.