I suppose I'll comment on my own photo, but first I'd also like to say thank you to everyone for the kind words and critique if any. I'll first respond to those that suggested cropping and I understand your point of view, but for me cropping out the foot or the guy in the booth in the back would really only leave me with the main subject and I prefer to hint at the answer then completely remove it. Who's the guy looking at? Maybe one of the other characters that we partially see, not at the viewer anyway. Why isn't he looking at the camera? This can be a little hard to answer.
When I'm taking pictures, things hit me so quickly that I rarely remember taking the pictures, even when I look at them. But I almost always make eye contact with the central figure and there is almost always a single person or two that stands out among the rest in my photos. I suppose it is because I'm looking for some sort of connection between myself and whoever it is I see on the street. I never hide that I'm taking pictures, though I'm quite fast at it, it's always obvious and people tend to look at me. I always make eye contact, because I like eye contact in my pictures, I can't simply blend in, I'm just as much a part of the world and involved in it as everyone else is and I don't want to make my pictures look like I was standing in the shadows. Sometimes I'll see them look and feel I'm overbearing and look away when in fact I'm not looking at them in an interested way but summing up the scene as a whole, making a quick judgement. My style tends to single people out from the group, I don't know why, that's just the way I do it. The picture above was taken in Heidelberg Germany during a local festival and was shoulder to shoulder people. It's strange that I isolate people like that, maybe it's my own feelings of insignificance and isolation showing through in the way I take pictures, but this is something that is pretty abundant in alot of my pictures.
The rest of the pictures from Germany and one from Vienna can be seen in a password protected gallery on my site, I don't like to make them public because I haven't registered them, which I only do twice a year:
http://www.tonyedwardsphotography.com/gallery/3717462
the password is: Pete
Feel free to look, I still need to remove a few that I'm not totally happy with. I've also got some from New Orleans that I haven't added yet, probably won't until after the first of the year when I copyright everything, then they'll all go into the Personal link at the top of the site.
I'll also comment on the centering. I think that's just the way I do it. I've noticed this in my street photography over the years and tried to adjust, but it's just become part of my style. It's something that I tend to like when looking at my pictures because it's so anti-photography and against the rules that it makes people a little nervous.
I'd also like to comment on the critique as a whole:
Can truly great pictures exist on their own? Yes. But there are really great pictures that would look really terrible when removed from their context. I think you have to become familiar with one persons style before you can judge any of their work as a whole or individually. Take infrequent's shoes. If that picture was side by side with pictures of other shoes with the same tones and compositional elements, our opinions of the individual photograph may skew slightly. What does everyone else think?
Linear Mode
