Inside a London Telephone Box - Critique

Critique
1

I just posted a play raw with this photo but would also be happy about some critique, so I’m posting it separately here :slight_smile:

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I’m quite happy with the result. I also tried a few things like blurring a bit the scene outside of the window or cropping out the red frame in the front but discarded them as they didn’t work so well for me. I’m curious to hear other opinions, though.

Edit:
Checking again, I realised I actually did keep the blurring (it’s already a few days ago that I edited it and my memory apparently is not that good :smiley:). I’m still not sure which one I like better, though, so below is the unblured version for comparison:

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I like both versions and I can barely tell a difference (mostly in the man in front of the red doorway). It is a good photo.

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I like the image, but I feel there is already a naturally existing blur of the background through the dirty glass and no extra blur is needed.

3 Likes
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Thanks a lot for the feedback! I’m still a bit undecided but tend to agree that the additional blur is probably not needed.

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If you want the telephone box interior to be the subject of the photo I feel like you have to blur the man in front of the distant telephone box otherwise he becomes the subject of the photo. The eye is drawn to bright primary colours and even more so if the man is in focus (in fact my eye even wants to stay there in the blurred shot). I might also have considered desaturating the exterior or reframing / waiting until the people had moved. OTOH that middle panel of the door might make an interesting image in itself.

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Did you try with slightly different camera positions so that the handset is not cut off by the upper frame and/or the dial buttons are a little less hidden?

(Maybe I haven’t understood at all what you mean to tell by the view from inside the box – as I’m steadily taught to think outside of the box …)

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I would have rotated the camera around the x-axis to make the vertical lines straighter.

@EspE1 It may have been too cramped to capture a larger frame. Perhaps, a portrait orientation would have worked?

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I only took that one photo, and admittedly didn’t take much time for the composition (e.g. I didn’t consider at all what was happening in the background at the time of shooting).

The options regarding field of view were rather limited though. I took the photo from outside through a broken window, so I couldn’t vary the position too much and it is already the widest angle of the camera. I think there was no way to get everything into a single picture. Portrait orientation would probably have worked to get the full phone into the frame, I didn’t consider that at the time.

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Better taken than not. Thanks for sharing your photo!

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I do this all the time, and it’s one of the reasons I like shooting photos locally. Usually takes a couple of visits for me to get the shot I want, and there’s always something I forget to pay attention to, in my hurry to take a picture. So many variables, and so easy to miss something. The last time was a really nice shot and I forgot I’d moved from the shade to the sun, and left my camera on ISO 1600.

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“My camera has the advantage of being slow.” John (“Jock”) Sturges