Subtitles of the Movie

Okay, we have seen a couple of photographs that have a very easy question to answer about what's the subject matter, where do we want the focus of the photograph to be, and all of that is going to answer what we do it from a technical standpoint. But what we are going to do now is look at another photograph, it is a bit more complicated from the standpoint of subject, and what are we going to do? Now this is a photograph of volunteers with the High Sierra Volunteer Trail group waiting for the dinner bell and so we have people that are doing different things. Now what am I getting to from the standpoint of the question of what are we going to do with this photograph? Well there are any number of things; we have got three distinctly different activities going on here. First of all this guy here, I do not know his name here, but this guy here is sleeping, taking a little nap before dinner. Here are Skip and Walter, having a bit of a conversation, and here is Eric and his son, reading a book. Three different things are going on in this photograph. Not to mention the fact that the trees add clutter, the chairs over here add clutter and so on, but basically there are three different things going on here. Now here is one of the ways we can look at this picture and crop just this guy sleeping. But if we are going to take such a tiny portion of the image and blow it up and print it, then obviously certain things need to be done to it to sharpen it, to bring out contrast, to just liven it up, you know make it jump out at you a little bit, and so that would be one set of technical skills that you would bring to bear to achieve all that. We go back and we look again and what else is happening. Well, we can crop Skip and Walter having a conversation in much the same way, and again we are taking a small portion of the image. Not quite as small as the guy sleeping in his lounge chair, but it is a smaller portion of the photograph, which is going to necessitate sharpening, brightening, adding contrast, and reducing the grain. The inevitable increase in grain that comes from enlarging a small portion of the slide image. So then we go back to the image again and of course we have Eric and Kyle reading their books, now that is a decent little photograph in and of itself too. We will crop that and again, bring it up to where we can see it that is a decent little photograph. And you know one thing we can do is we can take Skip completely out of there, we can transplant these trees, put him over here, get rid of Skip and we have this father and son, reading in the forest. So there you have it, three distinctly different things that you can do with the photograph. Now, I am going to give you a fourth one. This will be my take on it; my cropping would be exactly this, and my goal and my story is people having fun before dinner at trail crew. So four different approaches to this photograph, four different frames of mind about what you want to achieve and maybe what you want to do to it, out of one photograph. And that is what I mean when I say, what are you going to do with this picture and where is it going to go and how is it going to be used. All of that answers what you are going to do it from a technical standpoint.