Street Foto - Long cool woman in a black dress

arroyoshark

To paraphrase....

Saturday night I was downtown,
working with my photo eye....
Sittin' in the midst of bad pics
Flash cards piling high...

I saw her starting to jay-walk
like a tall walking big black cat
Well, Charlie I hope that you don't balk, boy
'cause I'm tellin' you she knows where she's at

With a long cool woman in a black dress
just a finite moment you make the call...
yeah, just one shot it could be a bad mess
'cause that long cool woman had it all..
had it all

germaine_sba

I really like the picture, but there seems to be something funny around the girl -- as if you might have cut and pasted her from another picture. Forgive me for saying that if you didn't. At any rate, it's an interesting composition, and for once I don't mind the wires at the top. They add atmospehre.

arroyoshark

Nope, no cut & paste job here. I was taking some shots of this old downtown theatre when "Long Cool" strutted into the scene. She cleared the parking meter and cut straight towards my side of the street, heading towards downtown nightclubs. She looked prepped to me.

After looking at this image for a bit, and while I liked the architectural context of the old building, I wonder if it would look better cropped tighter to focus more on the woman and reduce the amount of white truck on the left. Dunno

Here is the shot that set up the one I used:

germaine_sba

Actually, I downloaded the picture (hope you don't mind) and cropped it even with the edges of the marquee. I got rid of the car on the right and a lot of the white truck. IMNSHO, I think it helps, but it's your picture. I also cloned out the parking meter. It's a neat building. Too bad you can re-schedule the woman!

arroyoshark

germaine_sba wrote:

Actually, I downloaded the picture (hope you don't mind) and cropped it even with the edges of the marquee. I got rid of the car on the right and a lot of the white truck. IMNSHO, I think it helps, but it's your picture. I also cloned out the parking meter. It's a neat building. Too bad you can re-schedule the woman!

You've got my interest....can you post your cropped version? I don't mind the critique.

arroyoshark

Another possibility would be to just do a color fill on the white truck to make it darker and less prominent to the eye.

flyingdutchie

arroyoshark wrote:

To paraphrase....

Saturday night I was downtown,
working with my photo eye....
Sittin' in the midst of bad pics
Flash cards piling high...

I saw her starting to jay-walk
like a tall walking big black cat
Well, Charlie I hope that you don't balk, boy
'cause I'm tellin' you she knows where she's at

With a long cool woman in a black dress
just a finite moment you make the call...
yeah, just one shot it could be a bad mess
'cause that long cool woman had it all..
had it all

This is the type of street photography i really like. It is a very good pic.

Some comments, though :
- It's a pitty that this big white truck on the left side is there. It distracts somewhat from the woman.
- It seems the picture is somewhat tilted.
- A bit tighter crop may enhance your pic.

-- Anton.

arroyoshark

Thanks for the comments Flyingdutchie.

The street is slightly downhill, to the right of pic. There does appear to be a slight tilt to the Marquee, however, that could be corrected. Late last night I made a selection of the white truck on left and tried a couple of color fills, with opacity adjustments, to make it less bright. That shows some promise. I don;t want to crop it so tight that I lose the powerlines arcing across the top of pic, however. I think that it is essential to the scene, but that's me. I also don't mind the retro chevy parked in the street, or the parking meter. It's part of the street scene.

I don't normally walk around downtown making these photos. At the urging of both a peer and an instructor, I am trying different approaches.

germaine_sba

arroyoshark wrote:

You've got my interest....can you post your cropped version? I don't mind the critique.

OK. Here goes. I had to re-do them, because I discarded the ones I did this morning.



I decided that the girl was the most interesting elemet in the composition, so I decided to use a square crop and put her in the middle. The parking meter does't bother me as much as I thought it did, so I left it in. Besides cropping, I tweaked the curves (the picture, not the girl! ) to get some more contrast. I then did some dodging to bring out a few details in the shadows. I did crop off some of the top of the building, because there was a piece of sky that I thought was distracting. I guess I could also have cloned over it.



This one I converted to b&w using the red channel and then turning the picture into greyscale. I then tweaked the curves by using the girl's dress as the dark point. That pretty much shifted the contrast to where I wanted it to be. I cropped the frame, so she's a off-center and has something to "walk into". Again, I decided that the parking meter didn't bother me this time around. Same for the white car.

These are two really nice pictures. Thanks for letting me play with them.:):

mercphoto

Love the song (both versions), love the shot. Good job!

pathfinder

What form is the original file? I like this shot, but think the woman deserves much bigger billing and much of the rest of the shot can be cropped. My try....

Will the original file tolerate this kind of cropping?

arroyoshark

Hey Mercphoto, thanks for comments. That old Hollies song got stuck in my head all night after I took the photo. Was trying to have a little fun with it.

Germain/Pathfinder: Thanks for your critiques and alternative cropping. Got me to start looking away from the building and focusing more on the principle subject. I sort of like the vertical crop of my original, but maybe would still pull a bit more of the parked car into the view, it looks chopped off to me. The original was an 8 mp RAW file, at ISO 200.

I had not thought of even using the second image. It seemed a bit soft to my eyes. The image was recorded at like 1/30th of a second, quite rapidly as the woman was walking fast. On this one I do like the really tight cropping that was done. Thanks for the ideas.

I will work on it and repost my result.

arroyoshark

Here's my followup attempt to improve the original image.

Thought I am intrigued by Germaine's vertical crop, I gave it another try at a 1.5:1 crop frame, but tighter on the building. To me, including some of the street and building conveys the emptiness of the street, yet here is this woman obviously dressed for a night out in her LBD, walking through it. The woman is framed by the pickup, Marquee and car. I gave both the white pickup and the exposed sky a color fill to bring them down a bit. I cropped to keep the power pole and lines in the frame and to show all of the original foreground pavement to place the woman up in the image.

I applied a duotone, trying to achieve the look of the old AGFA brovira papers.

Frogwell

Forgive my presumptuousness, but I quite liked it with a gritty feel. For this I duplicated the main layer, changed it to overlay to highten the contrasts, added a channel mixer layer and hit monochrome, added a 6% noise to base layer and finally used a burn tool to darken some spots just to add a bit of flavour.