Is it a good picture now – or not?

Last Saturday I once again had the pleasure of taking photos at the kickboxing event "Get in the Ring" in the Audimax Hamburg. And since the organizer Till Görres is not only a nice person, but also liked my pictures last time, he let me take a look behind the scenes this time. This meant I could also be there when the fighters were preparing and not just directly at the ring during the fights.

Before a fight, I managed to take this picture of Marcel Tratnik in the stuffy catacombs of the event hall.

I had been watching him warm up for a long time when I saw him standing under the lamp in the bare vaulted cellar. I immediately had an image in my head that I then tried to create with my camera.

Of course the image is post-processed to sharpen the character of the image, but it is not cut. Although it is not a staged picture, I personally find it very consistent with the atmosphere I found there.

Now the question is, of course, whether this mood also comes across to viewers of the picture. After all, they weren't there and therefore see the picture with different eyes.

I posted the image online on Flickr and Facebook and received many good, helpful comments. The viewers were relatively unanimous that the fighter's tension came across well. The implementation in black and white also found a lot of friends. It was unclear whether the picture is good as it is or whether there is too much white space, too much empty space.

Consequently, I also posted the image in the anonymous image review in the Nikon Photography Forum. I have often had good experiences with constructive advice there. There were also people there who didn't think the picture meant anything and thought it was shot from the hip. The vast majority like the picture, even if there are small things to complain about, such as the slanted line at the top - which comes from the wall-ceiling transition. The drop shadow was heavily criticized in the Nikon forum, which for me is just an indication that the image presentation on Flickr is very poor, because with a pixel width of 500 pixels, such things are hardly noticeable. Viewers in the Nikon Forum also disagreed about whether the empty space was right or too much.

With pictures like these, it's important to me that a certain mood, a certain feeling comes across. In contrast, when I take a picture, I can enhance the mood and feeling by choosing the location and the pose of the person being portrayed - that's not possible at events like this. I don't want to disturb the athletes' concentration.

I personally find the empty space appropriate in this picture, because for me it represents the loneliness of the fighter. If I can blame myself for something, it is that I didn't make the shadow stronger and better - because for me that is important to the picture to appear more plastic. In my opinion, without a shadow, the athlete would blend in too much with the wall.

My personal conclusion: Photography is great! Not only are there hundreds of different subject areas, there are also hundreds of different ways to approach the topics and there are thousands of people who have different opinions on a picture.