Hi David,
One thing you learn as you become more experienced as a photographer is that you are not just trying to capture moments in time, you are also trying to manage objects in space.
This photograph is a classic example. You have three elements: the laneway, the lone figure leaning against the post and the woman walking up the street. Unfortunately though there is too much space between them. You might be trying to tell a story about this man waiting for his lady, but the reality is that they are really too far away to capture our attention.
There are a couple of things that you can do to improve this image although they are more band-aid than cure type measures. The first is to crop the image hard… I would effectively chop off the bottom half of the image as well as some of the left.
The second measure is to manage our eyes towards the two loan figures by simply making them the brightest elements in the frame… rather than actually lightening them though, it is better to darken the remainder of the picture.
The simplest way to do this is to use the Lasso tool with the Feather set to a rather generous 200 pixels (this will soften the edge of the selection) to wrap about the two figures; then all you need to do is inverse this selection (Select>Inverse) and then add a Curves adjustment layer. Grab the middle of the straight line on the curves graph and drag it down… this will darken everything except the figures. One of the great things about an adjustment layer is that you can now use the brush tool to paint White or Black onto the adjustment mask to selective lighten or darken parts of the image to suit.
Cheers, Image Doctor.
Image Doctor's edited version
We were in Gubbio (Umbria, Italy) during the Ceri Festival which involves four local teams dressed in bright uniforms. During the Siesta (lunch break) I spotted this lone figure. I liked the spot colour of his uniform against the drab colour of the ancient buildings. The arched walkway framed the shot quite well. It was virtually point and shoot as I didn't want to disturb him.