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Unseen Worker
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Mar 21, 2017 19:18:52   #
rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA
 
I will skip most of the back story behind this picture. In 1974, as a grad student in the School of Business at Indiana University, I spent several weeks in Caracas Venezuela assisting a professor who was teaching at a private school there. Part of my responsibility was being a courier, carrying {via taxi} punch cards from the school on the outskirts of the city to a computer center in the center of the city, waiting several hours, and then returning with the output. I knew this would put me in the center of the city with nothing to do for several hours, so the briefcase I purchased was slightly larger than needed for this task - one with just enough extra room to hold my Canon rangefinder camera, so I was able to wander around taking pictures during that time.

My usual practice when developed slides arrived was to triage - one pile to be filed immediately, one pile to be trashed immediately, and a "I'm not sure" pile. By the time I started scanning slides, the "I don't know" boxes of slides filled several cubic feet of moving boxes, as we moved from Indiana to Kansas to Massachusetts and them back to Indiana {about 100 miles from where we started}. In the past year I have finally taken on the chore of doing something with those slides. When I looked at this picture last night I decided that my first evaluation nearly 43 years ago had been right - I wasn't prepared to deal with it then, but being able to view it as something to be scanned rather than as something to be projected allowed me to change my perspective. The right half of the original slide was negative space. By cropping off that area, I basically changed it from a 3:2 orientation to a 2:3 orientation. The shoeshine boy is just a blob - but {please do not get into politics here!!!} in some sense his customers were the important people and his identity was totally irrelevant.

Remembering that this is a crop of a slide, so the underlying image doesn't contain any more detail than what you see here, I would be interested in reactions from others.


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Mar 22, 2017 06:58:37   #
Frank2013 Loc: San Antonio, TX. & Milwaukee, WI.
 
I find a conversion to b&w more appealing...

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Mar 22, 2017 09:10:27   #
jaymatt Loc: Alexandria, Indiana
 
I think it's a nice example of a street shot, and I agree that you should try it in black and white.

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Mar 22, 2017 09:33:34   #
Linda From Maine Loc: Yakima, Washington
 
The poignancy comes from the apparent young age of the worker (though I know this would be common in many countries) and the long line of customers, implying hard work for many hours ahead.

Otherwise, the message is the same for most of the service industry where there is direct - but unacknowledged - contact with customers.

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Mar 22, 2017 13:50:31   #
R.G. Loc: Scotland
 
You shot the shadow side of the people against a bright background. Something you can do with the scan that you couldn't do with the slide or negative is to lift the shadows and drop the highlights while keeping much of the contrast.

The way it's composed just now it focuses on the shoeshine boy and the customers are decidedly peripheral. If your intention was to make the shot about the customers I'd say you haven't succeeded. It sounds like there isn't more of the shot to the left to include more of the customers. Maybe you should go with the flow and make it about the boy.

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Mar 22, 2017 20:24:04   #
minniev Loc: MIssissippi
 
It is a solid "life/culture" image. The smallness and "unseen-ness" of the young worker strikes me first, and I don't really notice the men in the shadows. Were it mine, I'd make some effort to raise the shadows a bit just to see if that would bring them out a bit, since you felt they had the primary role here. Thanks for sharing an interesting moment.

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Mar 22, 2017 20:51:50   #
rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA
 
"Thank you" to all who have contributed comments so far, and please feel free to continue.

I don't want my silence so far today to be taken as an indication of my ignoring you. Today has turned out to be a somewhat mediocre day for me thus far, with a threat of a another one or two, which is why I've not been very active. I am reading and thinking about these comments, and I promise you haven't heard the last of me in this ... but I'll need a couple of days.

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Mar 22, 2017 20:56:08   #
Frank2013 Loc: San Antonio, TX. & Milwaukee, WI.
 
Take your time, after a week or so of no response we...(I) start thinking or wondering......mostly bad things...Bahahaha

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Mar 24, 2017 01:29:01   #
JD750 Loc: SoCal
 
I think it is a great street shot.

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Mar 24, 2017 01:29:25   #
JD750 Loc: SoCal
 
It tells the story that you told in words above.

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Mar 24, 2017 20:42:44   #
rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA
 
I guess I made a mistake. In my original post I should have explicitly said something like "if you have an idea of how this could be done better, please show me, because quite honestly, I'm not great at using gimp {my image editor of choice}". But, no, I didn't say that, so I had to figure out how to make good use of the good suggestions provided here.

I should probably explain how one of my slides becomes an image. I have a scanner - actually I have three of them, an Epson flatbed scanner with an extra light source in the lid, an elderly Nikon scanner I bought from a guy who refurbishes them, and a Plustek I bought when my wife wanted to jettison the ancient WinXP system I have to run the Nikon scanner. I use the Epson scanner only for large media. The Nikon scanner's multi-scan mode takes roughly seven minutes to scan one slide, but it looks at each pixel from 16 different angles, so it does the best job of washing out surface imperfections {and my older slides have a lot of them!}, and it seems to have the strongest lamp of the lot; thus, I still have it, and I use it for my more difficult cases. The Plustek scanner takes at most half the time taken by the Nikon scanner, and can provide 3600 ppi scanning {the Nikon does 2700 ppi}. Whether I use the Nikon scanner or the Plustek scanner, the scanner produces a TIFF file; I then use gimp to crop, adjust levels, and clean up scanning artifacts {scratches, fungus spots, etc}.

In this case, I used the Plustek scanner; I was cropping so much of the slide away that I wanted the higher density it could provide to make sure I made best use of every grain of image. I am thinking now that perhaps I should try the Nikon scanner to see if its stronger lamp {and ability to fine tune the lamp via a curves tool} could pull something extra out of the darkness - but that may be a project for another day.

I did save, using gimp's native format, this image just before I converted it to JPEG for display, so I went back to that file and tried to follow the suggestions that I lighten up the two customers. After I did that, I created a monochrome version.

Is this kind of what some of you were thinking of? If not, I would love to see better versions, because I'd rather not give up on this one quite yet.


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Mar 24, 2017 21:08:05   #
Frank2013 Loc: San Antonio, TX. & Milwaukee, WI.
 
Wouldn't say better, just different......


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Mar 25, 2017 09:51:54   #
Linda From Maine Loc: Yakima, Washington
 
Frank's version is powerful for all the details he was able to pull from the shadows, especially the shoes of the waiting customer - awesome! The b&w makes it timeless.

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Mar 25, 2017 14:30:10   #
R.G. Loc: Scotland
 
rehess wrote:
......Is this kind of what some of you were thinking of? If not, I would love to see better versions, because I'd rather not give up on this one quite yet.


I'm not posting this as "better", just suggesting possible alternatives. I messed with WB, Tint, Split Toning and tweaks in the HSL section to get the results below. Rather than try to explain it all I'll just leave it for you to compare to the original and decide what works best for you. I also messed with the light levels in predictable ways, some of it quite extreme.

The faces had some extreme texture which required some extreme blending of sharpening and denoise. If you were happy with the texture on the faces you could get away with much less softening - or possibly do some selective brushwork.

I just couldn't leave things alone with this one - I messed with the Aspect in the Transform section to give it a bit of a sideways stretch. Going by the verticals it could have done with some straightening, but it probably wouldn't be worth the loss round the edges (which are pretty tight already).

There was some strange orange fringing which my de-fringe tool didn't like so I left it.

-


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Mar 26, 2017 23:42:25   #
rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA
 
Thank you, Frank and R.G. My silence since your suggestions doesn't mean I've lost interest - it means that I'm mulling over what I have {and the wheels in my head aren't moving very fast right now (*)}. One of the things I have to deal with is what works well photographically in the context of the "facts on the ground" - I know, for example, that the skin of many Venezuelans is darker than the skin of a typical WASP, and that affects my thinking here, but right now, that is what I'm doing, thinking intensely, but in fits and not very efficiently. This may just have to simmer at the back of my mind for awhile.

Thank you for the suggestions ... and anyone else should free to make suggestions also.

(*)tmi

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