Exercise: Standing Back

This time I need to use my lens at its longest length, I have a 18 to 200 lens which stays on my camera for 95% of the time and I decided this occasion would be no different, particularly as I was hoping to complete the photographs for at least two of the exercises today.

I decided to process two variations of this photograph, it was taken at F9 1/125's iso 200 with a focal length of 200mm. I saw this busker just outside of Canterbury Cathedral and I liked the fact that he was just looking down playing the guitar and seemingly unaware of his surroundings.

I like the black and white conversion as I think its more reportage work I could imagine it being used in an article on buskers in and around the city centre, to me its more 'gritty' this way.

So far as post production is concerned I didn't do a lot, I took the clarity up slightly in camera raw,  I also adjusted the white balance as I had taken it with a daylight setting but I thought it needed warming slightly so I changed it to cloudy.I then opened it in elements 11 and adjusted the levels, I dodged the shadows around his face using a soft brush at 3% and a very small saturation adjustment followed by flattening the layers and finally the unsharp tool was all it took.

The black and white conversion the only change I made to the above was I used the contrast tool rather than the saturation after I had done the conversion.

I was quite lucky and didn't have too many problems with people walking in front of the lens, Canterbury attracts a lot of tourists many of them having cameras similar to mine and you tend to find that people will wait for you to take your photograph before they walk in front.

Since looking at the photograph I have asked myself if I would have done anything differently, I think the answer is maybe, I have posted the colour photograph to a group I am part of and it was admired by a professional photographer, who asked me if I would like some advice as he does a lot of this kind of work. Having said yes please after all having looked at some of his work and his comments I decided I would be mad to turn the offer down. The advice he offered was to use a smaller depth of field, maybe I will try my next ones at say F5.6 instead of F9 to blur the background slightly. I can see what he means as the posts to the back could be a bit distracting.