Reflections

 

A while back I tried to do some creative shots with the mirrors in our gym but was ultimately foiled by 1) the reflected flash from my camera was too distracting, and 2) the mirrors weren't very clean and every smudge was highly visible in the photos. So I gave up on deliberately trying to use the reflection as an artistic device. But every now and again it comes in handy. For instance, the above shot originally looked like this:
 
It was the result of one of those random shots you take just to capture the general hubbub of a workout with no real attempt at framing or composition. After I went through all of the shots, I thought this one might be worth some more work. In the background, Aaron Riley (one of our MMA instructors), was talking to Brown (our CrossFit instructor) and striking a fighting stance. Originally I tried to crop it so both Brown and Aaron were in the shot, but the barbell in the foreground was too distracting as it cut across Brown's legs.

My solution was to use the reflection in the mirror. I realized I could crop out Brown without losing his presence because he was perfectly reflected in the mirror. The result is a much tighter shot of Aaron and a more interesting picture, I think. The bumper plate of the barbell is still visible, but it's not nearly as distracting as in the original.

Finally, I converted to grayscale using filtered black & white, and then added a pale yellow tint just to see how it would look. I liked it so I kept it that way.