Photo Friday – Overlooked [photofriday.com]
I’ve just started doing the Photo Friday weekly photography
challenge today. I’m interpreting this week’s photo challenge with this
photo – it shows a woman struggling with her push trolley and bags
after crossing the street, but that detail is easy to overlook. The
building’s strong visual presence in the background makes it the
dominating feature of the photo and the woman only makes herself
noticeable after the other elements have been visually processed. I
find that the building is the first thing I notice, followed by the
bus, and finally the woman, and only because it’s centered in the
bottom of the photo.
This photo was taken in the city of Melbourne, Australia. The shot
was made in Auto mode (without any custom settings except a suppressed
flash) from the open window of a moving car. My digicam uses Matrix
Metering in Auto mode. The shooting data:
Focal Length: 8mm
Exposure Mode: Programmed Auto
Metering Mode: Multi-Pattern 1/78 sec – f/2.8
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Sensitivity: Auto
White Balance: Auto
AF Mode: AF-C
Tone Compensation: Auto
Flash Sync Mode: Front Curtain
Digital Zoom Ratio: 1.00
Saturation Compensation: 0
Sharpening: Auto
Noise Reduction: OFF
The flash did not go off (suppressed), and I didn’t realize I had
used a digital zoom of 1x while taking the photo. The digital zoom only
gets triggered when the optical zoom is at the maximum (3x zoom), and
the digital zoom probably contributed to the slight lack of detail. The
digital zoom also means that the photo was taken with a total of 4x
zoom. Chromatic aberration is noticeable on the left wing of the
building, and this was not corrected in post-production. The
post-production work was done in Photoshop 7.0 and involves:
Crop: A very slight crop to center the woman and reduce the
vertical scale of the building was applied to the original photo, with
aspect ratios intact.
Brightness: Gamma increased for better visibility.
Contrast: Contrast increased to draw out more detail from the woman.
