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Hi Deb,
I love street photography. Done well it can be a beautiful reflection on society and the cities we live in. What is worth remembering about street photography and the broader genre of documentary photography though, is that it is all about story telling and that is an art in itself. Do you simply say, here is a boy playing with a big web, or do you make the story a little more sophisticated by adding some supporting characters, and maybe one or two juxtapositions?
Let's look at this image for a minute. You have a fairly standard photo made in Federation Square of one boy looking at piece of public art, while above him another boy appears to be playing inside the web. Is this photograph saying great things to me? Not really.
My initial concern is that the boy and his friend are rather small, but also rather dark and flat looking in relation to the dynamic appearance of the Fed Square architecture, and the bright tones of the web. Personally, if I was making this image, the first thing I would have been inclined to do is get about 30 percent closer, get down to ground level and then put the camera into the vertical. Rather quickly this image would have taken on more strength (vertical compositions usually make for stronger photographs) and there is a chance you would have seen separation in the tube that the second boy is crawling through.
As a second option, if you were going to maintain this viewpoint I would be waiting for another person (or persons) to be walking through the bottom right of this image to add balance.
Now, as for what you can do with this photograph… I would start by using the quick selection tool to select the boy only, and then I would use the curves tool to add some brightness to him (dragging the highlight marker across will do this). The next thing I would do is crop the image harder; in doing this, loose the brick pavement and take off 20 percent from the top of the picture. This will cut back on the distractions and let you concentrate on the boys some more.
Now, one last thing... you can add a vignette to the image, just to tone down the perimeter and make it less distracting. The simplest was to do this is to make a selection with the rectangular marquee tool (have the feather option set to 250 pixels), then invert the selection and use the Exposure control to adjust the selection to about -0.6.
Keep having fun on the street… Image Doctor.
Web - Image Doctor's edited version
