Photo Critique – The Worker

Time for the second installment in the photo critique series. Your response to the last one was positive with quite a few people saying I was too nice in my critique, so this one might be a bit tougher. Once again, I won’t reveal the name of the photographer and my intentions in offering this critique is to give you ways to improve. More after the jump.

Before we get to the critique, a couple of announcements. Don’t forget that this Saturday is the Worldwide Photowalk. For anyone who’s participating anywhere in one, make sure you’ve charged your batteries, formatted memory cards and prepared sufficient water, hats, sunscreen etc to protect you from the summer sun.

For people in Taiwan, or those willing to travel to Taiwan, I’m going to be running a workshop in Taipei in the near future on basic location lighting. Class size will be a maximum of 10, so if you’re interested let me know and you’ll get first shot at signing up when it’s announced.

I was sent a total of three images and the one above is what we’ll be looking at this time. My first thought is why? Why did you take this photograph the way you did? For me, there’s no emotional connection at all, nothing about it to make me give it more than a casual glance before moving on. I guess it was an attempt at street or documentary photography but it comes up short. Even if it were part of a series of documentary images, I’d say it was just a filler. Try as I might, I cannot think of a way that this photo works.

Great photography is that which engages the viewer. Ansel Adams said :

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

That sums it up well. I don’t know your personal feelings about this image but you have definitely forgotten to include the viewer in the experience. If you haven’t already done so, have a read of my recent two part essay on creativity and seeing to give you some ideas. Part 1 and Part 2.

That said, let’s now take a look at the technical aspects of the photo. Here is a 100% crop of the man.

The jackhammer and his hand are nice and sharp but the face is a little too soft for my liking. If it were a staged portrait with the tool as the main point, that might work but it’s not and it doesn’t.

I can also see a lot of chromatic aberration, particularly under his helmet strap, along his nose and around his back. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do about this at the time you take the picture but it’s usually a fairly simple procedure to fix during RAW processing or with Photoshop’s Lens Correction filter.

Looking at the picture as a whole, it’s easy to see that it was taken in harsh midday/early afternoon lighting. The shadows cast by the traffic cone (and why didn’t you move it – it serves no purpose in the photo where it is) and the worker tell us this. As such, his face is a little lost in the shadows. This is fixable at the time of shooting. Carrying a small, collapsible reflector, or even just finding some kind of white cardboard sign (in Taiwan an easy thing to do) could have helped. You could have thrown it down on the ground to bounce a little light back up into his face. Also, changing the shooting position relative to the subject would possibly have given you a better angle. Shooting from where you did makes me think you were too afraid to risk being noticed taking the picture and so shot quickly and moved on.

Let’s now take a look at the treatment you gave it.

This type of look is quite popular these days, kind of a pseudo-HDR mixed with the Dave Hill look. Well, no one does the Dave Hill look like the man himself, so head on over to his site and see how it should look.

Your image has all kinds of halos, aberrations and weird edge effects. They can be eliminated during the processing stage but it takes a bit of time and care. Maybe more time and care than you want to devote to it. If you’re going to do it at all, you may as well do it properly. The processed image looks like you stopped halfway through and decided that was enough. Well, it’s not.

At that point I’m going to stop. There are enough problems with this image that continuing to list them is like flogging a dead horse. I hope it was helpful and not too mean-sounding.

For anyone who hasn’t been scared off, feel free to send your images for critique to the critique desk and I’ll put them to the test.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 06:00. It is filed under Learn and tagged with critique. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.