Capturing The Moment

Photography is like cooking. You not only need quality ingredients and the right mix and cooking time, but you also need to present it in an appealing way.

This is the original photo:

The ingredients of this photo are

- The setting...people are in their own domain and they don't feel the studio intimidation on their faces. Awareness of their position relative to their surrounding is mixing smoothly.

- Happy bunch...photographs, with people as the main subject, are always about an emotional state. Rarely you have all day to capture it, but often a very short moment.



Pretty much like this one:

The right mix and the cooking time are the lighting of the scene and the reflection of the the emotions to the picture respectively.

If the light is wrong and the subject(s) are bored, then you may end up with something like this:

Well, here we have the right ingredients, but a lousy meal :)

Post-processing is the food on the plate. I wanted it to be as colorful as the emotions of these people on the picture. So, I converted it to black & white :) Bu I wanted to add something more fun, more dramatic to it. So, I tone-mapped the image. And ended up with something, where the people are separated in an exaggerated way from the background to make the picture a one big laugh. Here's the final image: