Cropping the triptych

[SmartWombat]

Pure serendipity, but I find most of my favourite photos come from spotting something and shooting (not quite from the hip!) while I'm out and about.

Having spotted this family by the fountain taking their own photo on the cellphone, and risked it (at 1/3 f11 64iso) under mall lighting to blur the water, I now have a problem cropping it.

From the original I thought there was too much background of the shops in the mall, so I removed that.
I toyed with cropping at the bottom too, but then you don't see the bubbles in the water in the fountain and that makes working out that it IS water in a fountain a little harder. I didn't want it that abstract, having learned from my Bentley picture.

I tried cropping on the right, removing the stonework and leaving 3 "panes" in the photo with the children in. I reckon it almost works.

Then I tried using the stonework on the right and cropping out the girl in blue, and I think that is possibly the best.

But on the other hand I like the height of the 2 people leading your eye into the omage from left to right, with the boy facing right to left to send you back again ... then again I argued the gap between the streams in the fountain obscured her too much, so the girl in the blue went.

My indecision is final !!

Now then, you outnumber me, and I reckon there are more and better alternative compositions to be extracted from the original.

So I'll throw this one open
Which of my attempts is best, and what's your alternative

[Chunk]

Pure serendipity, but I find most of my favourite photos come from spotting something and shooting (not quite from the hip!) while I'm out and about.

Having spotted this family by the fountain taking their own photo on the cellphone, and risked it (at 1/3 f11 64iso) under mall lighting to blur the water, I now have a problem cropping it.

From the original I thought there was too much background of the shops in the mall, so I removed that.
I toyed with cropping at the bottom too, but then you don't see the bubbles in the water in the fountain and that makes working out that it IS water in a fountain a little harder. I didn't want it that abstract, having learned from my Bentley picture.

I tried cropping on the right, removing the stonework and leaving 3 "panes" in the photo with the children in. I reckon it almost works.

Then I tried using the stonework on the right and cropping out the girl in blue, and I think that is possibly the best.

But on the other hand I like the height of the 2 people leading your eye into the omage from left to right, with the boy facing right to left to send you back again ... then again I argued the gap between the streams in the fountain obscured her too much, so the girl in the blue went.

My indecision is final !!

Now then, you outnumber me, and I reckon there are more and better alternative compositions to be extracted from the original.

So I'll throw this one open
Which of my attempts is best, and what's your alternative

#3 I like the aunt/sister's (?) smiling reaction and think the moment is much weaker without it. What do we care about gray stone?

Nice catch on a soon to disappear arrangement.

[gahspidy]

I like #2 best, for same reasons that Chunk likes the third but I prefer more space on the right side.

[Seb]

Pure serendipity, but I find most of my favourite photos come from spotting something and shooting (not quite from the hip!) while I'm out and about.

Having spotted this family by the fountain taking their own photo on the cellphone, and risked it (at 1/3 f11 64iso) under mall lighting to blur the water, I now have a problem cropping it.

From the original I thought there was too much background of the shops in the mall, so I removed that.
I toyed with cropping at the bottom too, but then you don't see the bubbles in the water in the fountain and that makes working out that it IS water in a fountain a little harder. I didn't want it that abstract, having learned from my Bentley picture.

I tried cropping on the right, removing the stonework and leaving 3 "panes" in the photo with the children in. I reckon it almost works.

Then I tried using the stonework on the right and cropping out the girl in blue, and I think that is possibly the best.

But on the other hand I like the height of the 2 people leading your eye into the omage from left to right, with the boy facing right to left to send you back again ... then again I argued the gap between the streams in the fountain obscured her too much, so the girl in the blue went.

My indecision is final !!

Now then, you outnumber me, and I reckon there are more and better alternative compositions to be extracted from the original.

So I'll throw this one open
Which of my attempts is best, and what's your alternative

Hello,

I'd say that I prefer the second best. To me it's the most interesting framing and I think that having the 3 people is very important. I would only slightly crop the extreme left in such a way that the water frame the picture rather than having a small gap betwen the water and the end of the frame.

What hurt the image as far as I am concerned is the dof. I understand that you have used a small aperture to be able to blur the water while properly exposing the pictures but the background is distracting and visually unpleasing. This call for a neutral density filter or some Photoshop work.

regards

Seb

[SmartWombat]

Yeah, I was trying just for some water effects when I spotted them through the fountain.
So that I didn't miss the shot I didn't bother adjusting the aperture to limit DoF, just took it.
Besides, the auto focussing on the A2 isn't good enough to take this on the spur of the moment.
If I reduced the DoF then I'd probably miss the shot completely, the A2 has a nasty habit of focussing too close while ignoring the flex focus point location.

So it's Photoshopping to finish the job.
Thanks Seb, Gary, Chunk.