No Mercy

[yoyoma]

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2238/2264605602_fec98d5a03_b.jpg

[MarkR]

Love the expression, & the composition -- although the face is slightly "flat."

The bokeh, however, seems to have a weird, watercolory feel to me, which does not please.

[Miguel Delinquento]

This shot captures my eyes rather nicely, it is just compelling in ways I wish I could articulate.
The color rendition is very nice, I like the man's skin tones and especially how the light falls upon his face. The sharpness is excellent, I keep looking for evidence of oversharpening and am failing.
There is also a bit of ambiguity about the man that you set up with your framing of the shot. I wanted to see more of his whole self to place him in one of those cultural mental boxes that I have burdened myself with. By including elements of another man with a black hat to the left, I was trying to assume that your subject was a Hasid. But I cannot tell really, and it only matters tangentally. But that's a great impression by you!
Some issues: as the prior poster said, the bokeh is less than compelling. I also don't like having the yellow-cladded body in the background--it distracts. I also think the top of the subject's head is cropped too severely.
Overall this is a fine photograph.:thumb

M

[yoyoma]

Thanks very much for the criticism.

Allow me to explain a bit about the processing. The high contrast of the face was made using the "dave hill' effect of high pass filters in different blend modes. I am very pleased that you haven't found oversharpening, as this is the downfall of such an effect. I have desaturated the face, however I wanted to juxtapose his colorless face with other elements of the picture such as the blue jacket and the women in yellow which i have saturated a bit. My idea was to seperate his face and expression from the environment as much as possible.

The bokeh is a result of trying to compensate for the lens I had on the camera. I had too much depth of field, so I blurred the background to create the effect artificially. However, using Gaussian blur would have destroyed the detail in the beard which falls over the out-of-focus background. Instead, I blended the original layer with a layer of median blur which at least kept the beard sharp.

If anyone knows how I could have maintained the foreground sharpness using another filter which would give me better bokeh, I would be extremely interested to know.

Sorry if I'm making this a "finishing school" issue.