I found that by cropping the photo, I got rid of a lot of the clutter and focused more on the event. My eye is now drawn to three points; the lady’s face, full of concentration, the spray gun and tattoo and the girl’s face looking a little worried but watching intently.
I have applied a slight Gaussian blur to the background, just to calm down the clutter as the photo was taken on my phone, so didn’t have choice of aperture.
This shot was taken in a cafe in Marrakech a few years ago
and it’s taken until now to crop it down to the shot I intended to take. The
lady in the purple turban had caught my eye but as I didn’t feel confident enough
to take a photo of her directly, I took a shot of my husband with the lady in
the background.
I chose this tall, thin crop as I wanted to show the lady in
the setting and liked the lines created by the railings. I also felt that the
shape fit well with her looking up to the balcony. As the camera was always set
to auto in those days, the shot has been taken at an aperture of 5.6, originally
focusing on my husband and leaving the lady quite out of focus. I’m sure some
would consider this to be a problem but I think it fits quite well with the
setting and the general dustiness of Marrakech life.
My last shot was taken on a festival site and as with my
first photo, there is quite a lot going on.
In my crop, I decided
to focus mainly on the ice cream van and the litter left around from other food
stalls to show the environmental impact some festivals can have. Although the original shot still showed the
litter, I feel that the crop has made it the main focus of the shot.
