Firefighter at work

[MacMedic892]

I am a paramedic, and on Saturday, December 26, we were dispatched to a structure fire. I took the following shot of the original fire attack:



I submitted this to 123rf.com as a stock photo (after editing out all the identifying info on the back of his coat). The photo was rejected for "Poor lighting/composition".

So, was the composition really that bad? What could I do with the lighting to improve the photo? I edit with Picasa's tools . . . I don't have any of the Photoshop variants.

Thanks in advance.


Brian

[Sterling]

I certainly wouldn't describe it as "poor." The crop might be a little too tight and the fireman's coat may be a little overexposed. Fantastic capture of the fire itself though.

[Hartzler]

Brian,

I'm a total amateur. So take my words with a grain or maybe a jar of salt. In my opinion you've captured a good dramatic shot. It does look a little overexposed in the firefighter's back and some of the lettering and in the yellow. It's also a bit weak in terms of the leaf coloring . It's tough to get good exposure when you have the heat of the fire throwing everything off.

As for the crop, it is a bit tight. I might prefer to back up a bit and get more of the window and the house. I looked through your other shots and you got some very good ones. But returning to this shot and it's crop, since I could not go back and reshoot it a bit less tight, I might actually crop down a bit more.

How to crop is highly personal. But if I were cropping this, I might crop out the overhang above the window. It doesn't really give us more information and it's a bit of a distraction, maybe even a bit off the bottom, but leaving the entire window intact.

Then if I was using Photoshop, I'd probably use curves to set the black point or maybe levels to clip the blacks a bit. In Picasso, I'd go to tuning and move shadows up slowly, but stopping before I lose any detail in the wood work and the wire running along the top. This would make things pop a bit more and bump up the flames a bit.

In Picasso, I might go to effects and use the sharpen tool to just sharpen a little bit focusing on the "fire" lettering in his helmet (just a little bit of sharpening). If I were in Photoshop, I might use vibrance to bring a bit more color into the leaves and the yellow areas, but in Picasso, I think the saturation tool wouldn't work, so I'd leave the coloring as is (because most of the shot has good saturation, it's just those overexposed yellows and greens that could use a few vitamins).

Overall, it's a strong, interesting shot.

Mark

[MacMedic892]

This is the second post in reply (don't know what happened to the first!):

Thank you, Mark and Sterling, for your comments and advice.

I've edited the shot taken just previous to the one above, since it shows more fire.


I've made the following changes from the as-taken shot, using Picasa:

Straightened
Cropped to focus attention on the firefighter and the fire
Boosted shadows to tone down the overexposed coat
Used the warmify tool to put some color back in the coat

And using MS Paint, copied and pasted to edit out the FFD on the coat and the Bullard logo on the helmet strip, to make it suitable for stock.

The local newspaper used this photo and most of the narrative I wrote to accompany it--FRONT PAGE!
News : Fire destroys Franklinton home : The Daily News, Bogalusa, LA

[Garlic City Grandpa]

That's nice. Good job!