Daily Inspiration #217 by Roger Overall

Hi Steve,

Attached is a pic for your consideration for your Daily Inspiration posts.

I took it in Austin, Texas, when we were on holiday there. Maybe fittingly, it was taken the day after I heard Elliott Erwitt speak on the local university campus.

My daughter, Emily, loves dancing and music. She saw the fiddler and asked me for a dollar so she could “buy a dance”. She danced for about five minutes and he must have made $20-30. People thought she was part of the act and just kept on pouring dollars into his instrument case.

The “Rhythm and Blu” sign was serendipity as Emily was wearing a blue dress. I had to covert the file to black and white though because of the distracting colour of one of the T-shirts worn by one of girls walking by.

The shot was taken on a Canon 5DII using a 24mm lens.

Warm regards,

Roger

(www.rogeroverall.net)

11 Comments

  1. OMG! I love this story. How cute. Also, I love Elliott Erwitt. Would love to hear him speak at a conference.

  2. What a lovely image, Roger. I love the hint and tracing of light around the musician, and the softer drawing of the dancing girl. It’s an adorable and compelling image.

  3. Great photo, and great story. Have you considered subtly adding the blue back into just her dress? (Perhaps overdone, perhaps clichéd, but I think it would work a treat in this one)

    • Hi Zaph,

      Thanks for your kind words.

      I wouldn’t consider giving the dress a blue hint because it would detract from the whole story. By adding colour, you would be drawn to one aspect of the photograph, rather than the picture in its entirety. All the ingredients need to be balanced to tell the narrative.

      Roger

      • I agree on the “whole” comment. I also love this as a black and white.

        If you did want a color version, one thin to consider, I have had a lot of fun by taking photoshop and re painting photos by hand after B&W conversion. You can then just soften or alter the one distracting color and basically rebuild it by hand, but with a much different look that photographic colors. An added bonus is they look like the old time hand colored photos before color film was popular (usually used on portraits but it works for this kind as well). A quicker way to do it is Masking the whole area and putting a color fill in a layer on it and then adjusting the transparency to get what you want. It yields soft undersaturated colors that if done right look almost antique.

      • For sure, but without hearing the story first, there is no connection made between the sign and the dress. You can see it because you were there, we can see it because you told us the story, but it’s not in the photo by itself. The photo stands on it’s own without that, it’s a great photo, but not on the same number of levels.

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