cgardner
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Its a cute shot that tells a story: little boy offers pretty girl some cake. In the original version the story is getting diluted but the distractions of the over lit shoulder of the woman and all the stuff on the table in the background.
A good way to determine how to crop an image like this is to use "inside-out" cropping. Crop in tight on the main focal point - the boy's face and plate with the cake - then slowly expand the frame outward until you see stuff that doesn't contribute to the desire message and emotional reaction enter the frame. What you'll wind up with is a crop like PandaCat's which isolates and simplifies the storyline by the simple expedient of eliminating all the distractions from it. If you start using the "inside-out" technique when editing photos you'll find that it helps train your brain to spot similar distractions when shooting and you'll start cropping tighter in the camera to eliminate unnecessary distractions. But sometimes, as here, its impossible to crop out the distractions when shooting and doing it while editing is necessary. It this case I think the square crop works, but an even tighter horizontal one which minimizes the distraction of the bright shoulder would be even more effective at keeping the attention on the boy..
As for the lighting, a better way to deal with a situation like that is either to bounce the light up off the ceiling (if there is one) or if time permits use two flashes. The problem with direct flash is that exposure is only correct at one distance from the light source. So its physically impossible to correctly expose the kid's face without blowing out the closer shoulder of the woman. When the light is bounced, the source of the light becomes the point on the ceiling where the light hits and reflects, which would be equal in distance from both the boy and the woman.
Using two flashes in that type of candid situation is feasible if the off camera flash is made portable via a wheeled stand. I've been shooting candid shots with hotshoe flash that way since the early 1970s.
The shot above was taken by doing what I suggested above: bouncing most of the light on camera up off the ceiling with a smaller amount bounced forward off the foam diffusers I use. My second flash was up on the stage just out of frame on the left, mainly to make the guy on the stage the focal point, but it also added a nice rim light component to the figure in the foreground.
Another candid two flash shot where I simply parked the off camera flash in the corner and bounced it off the ceiling. In that instance bouncing the "key" light off the ceiling was necessary because people where standing around blocking the direct path of the light.
The shot above is similar to yours in how something in the foreground is used to frame the subject in the background. When I saw the guest of honor at the going away party would likely be standing there talking for a few moments I saw the opportunity to wheel my off camera flash around behind to the left to short-light his face and use the people in front to frame him. The guy in the foreground actually served as a "flag" to hide the off camera flash. By using two flashes that way I was able to independently control the light on my main subject in the middle and the fill on the figures in the foreground separately avoiding the burned out foreground look of a single flash on camera shot.
So while its a great candid capture based on content alone, there are several ways the delivery of the story could be improved by editing the scene via cropping and improving the lighting so there was more emphasis on the boy and less on the woman, who in this case is necessary for context -- explaining the action of the boy - but not really shown in any identifiable or flattering way. We mainly see the back of her ear so the less of her we see the more attention gets focused on the boy.
Chuck
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