Ladies in Peru

[Ken183]

Hello everyone

I am a new member from England and my experience of digital photography is limited.

On a recent holiday in Peru I took this candid shot of two ladies standing on a corner in late afternoon having a chat. I think the muted colours and the composition give it a nice atmosphere. Do you agree? As I said I am an amateur. The photograph is just as it came out of my Pentax K100D Super as a JPEG file. Would it benefit from post production, and if so, what can I do?
Lens: SMC Pentax-FA 1:4-5.6 35-80mm
35mm
f4.5
1/1000 sec
ISO-400
Metering mode - Pattern
Exp Comp 0
Shutter priority

[Doug Sundseth]

Composition: I'd really like to see more space to the left of the ladies. Since you say this is the full frame, that ship has left the dock, of course, but next time... I think you would benefit by cropping quite a bit of the space from the left and bottom of the image. You can still keep the environmental feeling and much of the color composition while losing the least interesting parts of the image and increasing the emphasis on the women (who I take it are your real subjects here).

Lighting: It's hard to get pleasing photos in harsh midday light. In this case, you have deep shadows on the fronts of your subjects that obscure the interesting details. I'd recommend pulling up the darker areas in post-processing (Shadows/Highlights adjustment or curves in Photoshop, Fill Light in Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom, other places in other tools).

I think you saw an interesting photo here. But I think you need a bit of work to communicate that vision to your audience.

HTH

[Ken183]

Many thanks for your very welcome advice Doug. I will use Photoshop and try to do exactly as you say.