OOYCZ challenge #7 winner

JAG

Grandma R wins by default, as she is the only brave entry for this round. Thank you and congrats Grandma R! :clap

That said, critiquing can still be done.

JAG

Your image is perfectly lit. I like the intent look of listening the lady has on her face. As for the composition itself, the picture frame and what looks to be a backpack, are distracting. I do realize you were shooting as a candid shot. Thus things like that might not be avoidable. Thus, a little more head room for the lady would bring in more of the picture. Or was that a framed mirror? Not sure. The frame could have been cloned out in post processing and so could the backpack. Her shirt seems to be important to this image. I wish you could have gotten the last word in better. I am thinking it is saying gold? Regardless, you do have a strong entry here for capturing a moment in b/w. Kudos! And again, thank you for participating!

grandmaR

The last word on the shirt is COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) The original didn't have much more of the word in it, and when I straightened the picture it got cut off.

The lady is a lung cancer survivor and has had a lung transplant so the shirt is important to her. She's the president of the Better Breather's Club by default since the former president died. (That happens to us in that community on a more regular basis than I would like.)

The back pack belongs to the speaker for the meeting we had just had. He was also a lung transplant patient and he has cystic fibrosis. The backpack which he forgot has his medication. She's calling to see if she can find him or find a place to leave the backpack so he can get it and I was waiting for my husband to pick me up. After she got off the phone, she took the backpack to the Respiratory Rehab Center (which was in another part of the hospital where we had the meeting), and just about the time my husband got there to pick me up, the speaker came back to get his backpack and I was able to tell him where she had taken it.

I am crap at post processing, or I would have removed the frame and backpack. I probably could have removed the zippers which are (to me) the distracting part.

Anyway thank you for declaring me the 'winner'.

puzzledpaul

Re the 'environment' issues of this pic, I suggest an (easier / quicker) alternative to cloning would be to crop them out.

ie top cropped just below the frame (or just below the sunglasses if not wanting half the glasses)
RHSide cropped where the backpack intersects her shirt sleeve
Bottom cropped just above COPD ... still leaving 'ribbon' in frame.

I suspect the result would be a decent looking square crop.

Moving the RHSide crop line even further to the left might also be worth consideration as it'd de-centralise her face / head / eyes even more, and since she's looking towards frame Left, give more negative space in front compared with behind.

pp

Edit Since this image has already been cropped, perhaps there's sufficient in the original to crop the bottom off in such a way as to remove COPD but leave a space between the tip of her R elbow and the frame bottom ... rather than having it just touching (which, imo, can look a bit odd)

Btw, without the (pic)frame in frame, there'd be no reference to use re levelling, so this also plays to your advantage (pic frame isn't quite level with image frame anyway)

grandmaR

That's a good idea. It never occurred to me to crop it like that. When I do, this is what I come up with (and it is square)



Actually I do like it better with a tiny bit of black on the right