Enjoyable Things

kurzvorzwoelf

Do you remember the times you could truly enjoy simple things like chasing water beams out of a fountain on a hot day in summer? I wonder if this little girl in front of Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow will remember these good times when she grew up.

CC always welcome.

Richard

Nice, happy scene. I think she would stand out more if the background had been less sharp. A wider aperture might have worked, but you could try using the PS lens blur filter, then masking the blurred layer to keep her sharp. Just a thought.

kurzvorzwoelf

@Richard said:
Nice, happy scene. I think she would stand out more if the background had been less sharp. A wider aperture might have worked, but you could try using the PS lens blur filter, then masking the blurred layer to keep her sharp. Just a thought.

Thanks for your comment, Richard. Yeah, you are right - it would be of advantage if I had considered depth of field when taking the shot. I must admit, this was one of the first shots I took after I got myself a serious camera, so probably it was set to Program mode, see a scene, try as hard as possible to get the framing right and shoot. The picture is slightly cropped in that version, so I didn't get the framing right and program mode decided on F9 for the aperture and probably the focus point was in the middle of the frame as well. So well. I have to live with it. Photography can be demanding on the cognitive skills I hope one day it will be more or less like driving a car, so all these processes become automated much like shifting gears and pushing the breaks.

I tried hard using lens blur filter (although not in PS, I'm currently using On1 Photo Raw) but all I got was a less realistic picture, because some of the elements (mostly the water fountains) that are in same distance as the girl got blurred as well. And I didn't have the skills nor the patience to mask them all out Maybe with some time on my hand, I will revisit this task and post the outcome

Cheers,
Can

pathfinder

While I agree that the depth of field is not ideal here, I suspect if you try to blur the background very much it will be hard for the viewer to see that those are fountains all around and behind her. I think you could just crop closely around the little girl, keeping just the fountains, and losing all the buildings and the people wandering around behind her that are not pertinent to this image. I think that type of crop might work. Easier than a lens blur filter too.

This scene reminds me bit of the fountain park in downtown Chicago - I suspect Richard remembers it as well - https://photos.smugmug.com/Travel/ExcellentAdventure/i-6ZRbqTp/0/ef8791aa/XL/kids in the fountain _MG_8522-XL.jpg

kurzvorzwoelf

Thanks to some valuable tipps @Richard shared with me via PM (thank you a lot!), I dared to go back to that Lens Blur filter. I actually used two different Lens Blur filter with a gradient masking for each of them. The first applies a gentle blur with a large feather/gradient for the foreground that is closer to the girl. It ends at about the hip of the girl. The second one was set much higher (ending at about the steps in the background) and applies a more strong Lens Blur for the parts of the image more far away from the subject. Then i selectively unmasked the girl and some of the fountains close to her.

This is the result. What do you think? It still feels a little un-natural to me.

I also tried a crop like @pathfinder suggested. I chose a 1x1 format, because I wasn't able to remove much of the distractions with a portrait crop in the original 4:3 ratio. For my taste, the picture loses some context (Tretyakov Gallery) but really works by bringing the girl more in focus. Unfortunately, I also lost a lot of resolution from the original 16MP - the crop cut it down to a mere 4MP, 1971x1971. Anyway, here's the result

torags

Great scene... good grab

Juano

I like the crop, you can see her expression better.

kurzvorzwoelf

Thanks Torags and Cristobal. Yes, I do like the crop as well. Still thinking about whether the resolution of it is good enough for a personal print or not, tho. But I guess that's a different topic/thread.