Minimize distraction to focus attention: The Clone and Smudge Tools

 
Sometimes the shot is of the fan, not the athlete
There is no doubt that children are an integral part of the CrossFit community. Whether they are doing their own scaled WOD, or cheering on mom or dad, their faces can tell another side of the story not reflected in the rest of us. Above is a shot of Lil' Beaner Bee who was thrilled to see her mom and dad cross the finish line after they disappeared momentarily to run a 400m sprint. I had taken some shots of her parents racing each other, but they weren't as precious as the one of their daughter reacting to them. I guess the lesson learned (for me) is that the audience can be every bit as exciting as the athlete.

In order to focus on her glee, I decided to crop it tight. The darkened gym and red mats naturally framed her face. Unfortunately, there was an annoying white sheet of paper on top of the mats that I couldn't crop out. Given the simplicity of the scene, I found that paper to be quite distracting. In The Joy of Digital Photography, Jeff Wignall points out that the fewer elements are in a photo, the more important each one becomes. Therefore you should minimize extraneous items because they draw attention away from the main subject.

Cloning and Smudging Tool
Unfortunately, Picasa does not include a tool to remove items from a photograph. But both GIMP and Photoshop have a Clone tool which allows you to copy a part of your photograph from one location to another. In this case, I wanted to copy some red from one section of the mats and "paint" it over the white paper to erase it from the scene.

  
Above are two shots showing this effect. On the left is the original shot showing the white paper. The newly cloned image is on the right. Not bad.... but the cloning tool isn't perfect and sometimes it leaves sharp edges where the shades of red don't blend perfectly. (You can see this if you click on the thumbnail and view the full size image.) I used the Smudge tool to manually blend the colors all around the perimeter of the paper and got the following result:
 
I can still see unblended areas but I'm not too concerned because I plan to crop it. Using Picasa, I finish the photo by tweaking the shadow and highlight features (to add more contrast between her face and the darkened background) and then bringing the temperature slider to the right (warmer) to get rid of the slight green cast. Finally I cropped it to include a large portion of the red mats because I thought the pattern was interesting and helped to frame the picture. Here's the final before and after:
  

To see the rest of the pics from today's workout, visit Crossfit OSMA Olympics