Ice Cream On A Busy Street In Madrid

I created this image in August 2019 during a trip to Madrid, Spain.

At the time, I was for a work assignment living in South Africa, while my family stayed in the US. My daughter decided to go to university in the Netherlands, and since my wife was going to help her settle in, we came up with a plan.

My wife and daughter would fly to Amsterdam via Madrid, and on her way back, my wife would stay a couple of nights in the Spanish capital. I was going to visit my daughter in the Netherlands and fly from Johannesburg via Madrid to Amsterdam. We arranged it in a way that my wife on her way back and I on my way in could have a couple of days together in Madrid.

This arrangement worked very well, and my wife and I had a great time in what I still consider as one of the greatest cities in the world. We lived in Madrid during another work assignment, and it was very nice to revisit all the well-known and lesser know spots in the city we remembered from then.

One of the main streets in Madrid is the Calle del Arenal, a pedestrian shopping area in the middle of the city. While walking the street, I turned around and snapped this image of a young couple sharing some ice cream as the main subject. Hence the title: One More Scoop.

I like how my eye first is drawn to the couple in the front, and then to the man in the white shirt in the middle of the image. And next to the movement of the other people in the street in the background. While I was, and still am, very pleased with how the image turned out, I also learned a lot from the critique I got after submitting this image for review to Lensculture:

We see a couple sharing a cup of ice cream. It's a nice, intimate moment that is worthy of a photograph. As a rule, our eyes are initially drawn to the brightest highlight in an image. This photograph is a bit confusing because I immediately identified the man in the center of the frame as the focal point. It's because of his placement, his white shirt, and the fact that he is fully in-focus. Consider using a shallow depth-of-field to help distinguish the focal point in your images.

This feedback refreshed my knowledge of how people first look at highlights in images; it also made me realize that I have memories that define the picture for me in a way other viewers don’t.

Since I remember that the first thing I saw was the couple with the ice cream (the man in the white shirt walked a bit later into the frame), I look at them first. Viewers who don't have that memory will look first at the man in the white shirt.

The Lensculture reviewer got confused by this image. However, I wonder if the confusion was not as much created by the image, as by its title. Would the reviewer have been less confused if I called it, e.g., 'man in white shirt shopping'?

Based on this feedback, I learned three critical things for my photography:

To be aware of highlights that can draw the viewer's attention from the main subject
To use depth of field to ensure the viewer knows what the intended main subject of the image is
To be intentional with image titles
To remember that I have memories regarding each image I created that other viewers will not have, which will affect what they and I see in an image.

In the end, I still like this image as a nice example of candid street photography, and I consciously decided not to change the title.

Let me know in the comments what you see, where is your eye drawn to first?