The sousaphone player

I took a few "street-style" pictures of the Easter celebrations here in Corfu. I think this one of a sousaphone player turned out the best, as a number of things seem to be going on while the band is preparing. Notably, an unhappy trombone player seems to be missing all but the tip of his trombone! I wonder what happened... Let me know what you think, also of the processing. K1ii + FA-31.

That's a belting shot, love the processing. Personally I'd crop it tighter taking the face on the left out, a bit off the top and the other Sousa out from the right.

The trombone player is holding a tuning slide used to finely adjust the tuning of or draining it. Unless he's holding the rest in his other hand,he must have mislaid or dropped it.

Thank you Johnha,

My original crop was tighter, just as you describe.. I processed it in-camera, with toy camera effect!




Ooops sorry that came out sideways...

But on the flip side, it also crops out some of the marching band in the background, and while the subject is "cleaner" it hides the fact that this is in the centre of the marching band. Not sure which framing i prefer, honestly. Original color balance is impossible, as the light sources all have a different color temperature.

Marching bands are very important to us in Corfu, we have 19 philharmonic societies! The sousaphone player was in the oldest dating from 1840. I heard that a total of 700 (no typo) musicians were marching througout town the evening i took the picture.

Thank you for explainineg what the trombone part is. He doesn't look very happy about it...

I prefer the original in black and white. Excellent photo.

The guy behind the sousaphone player doesn't look too happy. Maybe he lost part of his instrument, or just doesn't like playing the hair dryer .

Lol gwyn!

Super shot , the humour is great too.

I think the tighter crop works better as it emphasises the two characters whereas the wider one distracts from them. Either way, it's a wonderful B+W.

Both work fine for me, for the respective reasons stated above. I'm partial to b&w, so would like to see the cropped version in monochrome - but it works well enough in colour that I would also like to see the first version in colour too!