Comment: Good portraiture is often a balancing act between revealing a person's physical form and, at a deeper level, what makes that person who they are. As such there are days when you should get close to your subject and there are others when you are better off moving back to bring in more of their environment. This is one of those instances where I think you should have moved back.
At the moment there are a lot of things that are not contributing to the story: the edge of the mirror, the bright picture frame on the wall behind him, the dark out-of-focus mass that is the back of the clown’s head. At the bottom of the frame you can just establish that the clown is holding a makeup sponge but again, the image is cropped too tight to really consider this to be a deliberate part of the scene.
So, what would have happened if you’d zoomed out to a wider focal length to encompass more of the scene. For one, we could have kept the clown’s face in the mirror. Second, chances are we would have got to see more makeup lying about and some more details in the caravan. With a bit of luck we might have even got to see more of what the clown was wearing.
Working with wide lenses can be particularly useful when working in low-light conditions. Wider lenses allow you to use slower hand-held shutter speeds, which also gives you the chance to close the aperture down an extra stop. There is also an improvement in apparent depth-of-field, allowing more of the image to appear in focus.
One other point – the Nikon D3 can easily deliver great images at 3200 and 6400 ISO, but if you get the chance, try shooting JPEGS from the camera at 12,000 ISO in Black and White mode… they look fantastic. Might be worth a try if you ever get the chance to revisit this clown.
Keep at it – this image shows plenty of photojournalistic promise.
Be a Clown
