Photo Carousel #11: "Player in the Park"

Here's my next Photo Carousel entry, "Player in the Park".  Click the photo above to see it larger and read more about it beyond what I wrote below.  To see it even larger you can click on this link.

From a creative perspective, this photo was an exercise in compromises to get what I wanted from a candid situation.  So the point of this photo is to "work your subject" until you get the image that you want.

For this picture I wanted to hide most of the player's face while still getting most of the saxophone and the open music case in the photo.  Not easy to do.  Every way that I tried to reposition myself to improve the composition ended up putting another bad background element in the photo.

Ultimately, I comprised to get this composition and left to go back to our hotel.

The issue with the color version of this photo is......the color!  There's too much of it!  The grass behind him on the hill of the park came out very green.  And the red bricks on the ground in front of him were also pretty bright.  Yet I knew I wanted to do something with this photo...

Finally I hit on the idea of desaturating the whole image and leaving just him in color.  This achieved the effect I was looking for, which is to draw the viewer's eye to him and not the other elements that I couldn't get rid of.

In the end, it came out nice as an 8x10 print....but not before some coaxing to get its center of attention clearly defined.  It was a fun exercise playing around with this shot.  I wouldn't use this black and color technique often because it's kind of cliche in a way, but for this shot it worked.