Greetings all. I shot this recently at Indian Summer Festival in beautiful downtown Milwaukee. I was shooting between the people in the crowd. I realize that someone's head got a little in the way in the lower left. Are there any other thoughts or comments? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.
1/50 s is very slow for handheld and 170mm. The rules of thumb are to shoot with a shutter speed faster than i) 1/500 for sport or motion, ii) 1/100 in general or iii) 1/(mm of lens x 1.6). You are lucky that it is not extremely soft. And at iso100 you had lots of room to go up to iso400 or so
I like the colors and the framing but I don't like the head on left bottom or the leg out of nowwhere and the background that is busy- I would make a layer, blur the layer and paint in the clear spots in photoshop. If not blur then darken. If neither then vignette filter. It is worth fixing.
Thanks for the comments everyone. Yeah, Scott, I totally agree with the background. Unfortunately there was audience all the way around them. RE: colors. There was an announcer there who said that real Aztec costumes would have been this colorful, but instead of plastic and polyester they would use gold, silver and gemstones. Makes it a little more understandable why the Europeans were looking for El Dorado.
Back on topic, I'm not very good with PS yet, so I need to work this one.
It's a great capture. Good colors, good exposure. Personaly, I would have used a shallower DOF, but this works. It would also be more effective if you got a shot with her arms out, instead of folded in front of her torso.
BTW- All I can think of when I see a shot like this is: "C'mon, let's put on some colorful costumes and dance around for the rich, silly tourists!"
Now it looks really faek, like you posted on pic on top of a different background.
I have no experience with this, but I'm thinking that you need to slightly blur the edges of the dancer as well, those parts of her that are further away from the camera than her face. (her ears, the back feathers, back clothing, etc)
This would more closely mimic a true wider aperture.
Colors are great. ( the dodging effort was a washup IMHO ) I saw you shot this with a 70-200 f2.8. This would have been a good one to set to AV at a larger aperture for two reasons. You could have gotten a much higher shutter speed which would make parade shooting easier, and more importantly, you could have reduced the impact of the background which kills this photo.
