Taken Early November '97 at King Richard's Faire in Mass, with a Nikon N6006, Quantaray 70-300 f/4-5.6, handheld (and somewhere at the tele end).

While this is one of my favorite pictures (difficult conditions, and the only shot I took of this performer, but it came out just right)... I don't know if it does anything as a photograph for anyone else.

One of the things I often have trouble with in my photos is the background - in this shot I was specifically hoping to get the background out of focus. Looking at it now, I'd rather have the background even more out of focus. I do find it charming that one of the kids sitting behind the fence isn't looking at the firebreather. I also wonder about the woman taking a shot to the left of the firebreather's head. What does her photo look like? Am I visible in her photo? What is the man saying to her?

I suppose one could look at a picture like this as a fan of Ren Fairs, as a fan of firebreathing, as a tourtist, as a photographer, etc... When you mull over a photo do you put on different hats?

-- Tundra Slosek (tundras@draconis.com), June 30, 2000

Answers

Doh! Photo here

You'd think that a computer geek would be able to get the photo link right...

-- Tundra Slosek (tundras@draconis.com), June 30, 2000.

Getting those quotes right is soooo difficult... :-)

Lovely picture, great pose. As for the background: That is always difficult at shows like this, but I like the way you have at least managed to isolate the fireball nicely. It does mean that the ball rather than the performer tends to be the focus of the image. A more out-of-focus background would have helped: try to de-focus the background in your favourite photo editing program.

-- Allan Engelhardt (allane@cybaea.com), June 30, 2000.

(Offtopic: is it me, or has photo.net become unreliable to the point of uselessness? I used to store my images there but now I can't even load the main index. I hope the image below works for everybody.)

I wrote:

try to de-focus the background in your favourite photo editing program

Below is a very crude example of what I mean:

-- Allan Engelhardt (allane@cybaea.com), June 30, 2000.

Backgrounds in general

Allan,

I've played around with defocussing backgrounds in the past - as well as more extreme things like wiping all the saturation from the background, or using "sharpen" on the background excessively and then running smooth on the background over and over. At this point I've decided that I don't really like such manipulations. While I don't really take any photos for anything other than my own pleasue (so I don't have to particularly worry about the whole ethics question), I find that the only kinds of post-exposure editing I am comfortable with are cropping (which this particular image is), dust/scratch removal and image-wide exposure control.

I watch people at work dodge/burn regularly, and while I understand why they are doing it, I find that the original image, while "weaker" (the eyes are too dark, etc) just feels better. If the editing was done perfectly (in the sense that I couldn't tell that it had been done), would I have the same objection? Probably not.

For myself, it boils down to "if it isn't right on the film, it probably isn't worth fixing in Photoshop". When it comes to judging other people's work... as long as the edit doesn't distract from the whole - I don't really care.

OT: Quotes - preview would be nice, but like I said... you would think I geek would be able to do it right the first time. In fact, I work on one system (Nortel SL1) which doesn't have any concept of a backspace/del function at all. If you hit either key - it spits out an error and makes you start entering that line all over again. What a pain in the tuckus!

OT2: This is why (at the heart of it) I ended up shelling out the bucks to own my own domain and control the server for it myself.

-- Tundra Slosek (tundras@draconis.com), July 02, 2000.