woman with red hair, English Bay

[Katherine Enns]

This is another one of the English Bay photographs taken on the way home from the field in the north
Canon EOS 5D Mark II
35 - 105
ISO 200 1/200
f 1/20 Comments welcome. I can crop it, of course, but I like the big blue thing going on.

Thats her purse there, I was going to take it out but decided against it.

[Roy Priest]

Kat, that could be Cyndi Lauper. Saw her last night at the PNE and she had a hairdo just like that.:D Interesting point of view. What is the white thing to the right of the sailboat? It is distracting to me, perhaps try cloning it out?

[Jeff Dyck]

Hi Katherine - I really like the blue and red theme you have going, but there a couple things that I don't think work as is. First cardinal rule of landscapes - get the horizon straight! While the log your subject is sitting on looks level, it is the water I'm concerned about - you have to rotate the entire image counterclockwise by a degree or two. As for composition, I don't have a beef with the sailboat - I actually think it could work well if you crop the image differently. Looking at the shot it seems "heavy" on the right hand side - I would consider cropping off about 1/4 of the width off of the left side (i.e. crop so you cut off the back end of the barge with the green cargo containers) and a crop bit off of the right side to balance, so that the sailboat and the seated woman are both 1/3 of the way in from either end. You have lots of sky left to crop down from the top to get an aspect ratio that works for you at the new width.

i.e. something along this line -

77809

[Dave Mills]

Hi Katherine, Your idea was interesting but compositionally there are some issues.
First off the image was photographed around midday.The image would of had far more impact either earlier or later when the light was softer.
There was a slight rotation issue that Jeff mentioned. I would of also preferred the green ship on the left not merging with the red.
I also feel the image has way to much sky which isn't adding much to the story. This image lends itself to a pano crop and I would crop the top down to a little above the lower cloud bank.
Another idea would have been to stand a bit to the right so the green ship wasn't merging and concentrated on shooting the girl and the 3 ships at anchor. Not including the ship on the far right...

[Katherine Enns]

Roy, thanks for your reply! I love that part of Vancouver. Maybe it was Cyndi, ha ha. Thats her purse. She looked a bit grumpy to me. Jeff, I was aiming for keeping the foreground level, as the sea line was intercepted. Is there a cardinal rule about which horizon you have to level? Dave, that was shot at 9 AM. I agree about merging, not much I can do about it, Thanks for the comments. kat

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Kat,
Usually, water lines need to be level....so Jeffs rotation was the way to go. I understand that you liked the sky, but given that it didn't have much detail and was a few contrails.....I felt that the vastness took away from the red headed woman. A few steps to the right may have given you a bit more seperation on the boats.....but I decided to play with the crop tool to show some possibilities for you to explore. The 1st repost was just a .8 degree CCW rotation and then a pano crop.......this immediately put the emphasis more on the woman IMO. 2nd repost took some more off the right and broke a few rules.....placing the woman almost dead center. The entire emphasis is no directly on her! In the field keep a checklist in your mind of what you are trying to capture.....then start eliminating what is not important to the scene. In this case, the big expanse of sky was taking away from the scene and the pano crop just made it simpler and more focused. Let me know what you think.

[Roman Kurywczak]

2nd tighter

[Katherine Enns]

Thanks Roman, for making an effort. Now that I look at this again, I wince at the 0.8 degrees, and dont know why I didnt see it, except I could blame it on my stigmatism...;)

I like the pano a lot, and I think rules should be broken, myself. But I regret the loss of the vapour trails, I know they are not considered 'natural' enough, but I sort of like the way they came out of her head there. When I posted this I recognized a crop might improve it. Thanks again for showing me the way, and giving me some things to think about when out there. kat

[Dick Glover]

A strong preference for Roman's first pano. The sky and contrails are not strong enough to add to the other subjects and therefore reduce the focus on the primary subjects so I agree on cutting the sky. Given that something is going to be cut on the right, the first pano cuts the ship and the log, but leaves most of both. The second pano cuts the log, a small ship and the mountain which seems more distracting than the first pano. Never the less, I like your idea and technicals look good. Thanks for sharing.