To Crop or Not to Crop

1/1250s, f/1.2, ISO 100, 50mm
To crop or not to crop: I took this picture a few weeks ago and initially decided to crop it and move the subject to the right of the frame.  I try not crop my images excessively but in this case I felt that the surroundings didn't add much.  And cropping seemed a way to bring the viewer closer to the woman in front.  But when I came across the orignal image yesterday, I realized that I made a mistake.  While there's not much going on around the woman, the surroundings provide more context and reveals more of the street's grit.  The cropped image is below the fold.  What do you think?

1/1250s, f/1.2, ISO 100, 50mm

Messages Under the Moon

I went back to Victoria Park tonight with a friend. It was the last day to experience the full display of lanterns in various forms and shapes along with the make-shift carnival the city had put on in the park. Earlier this week, I had been fascinated with the time and care people put into writing messages on public "wish boards". Tonight, the sponsor of the Carnival (and the giant lantern fish), Lee Kum Kee Soy Sauce, handed out small paper "wish tags", and I went around and snapped some more shots of people writing down their wishes.

Again, the light was tricky.  Not feeling that color added much to the shots, I decided to process the photos in black and white. I shot most of the photos with the aperture wide open at f/1.4 or f/1.6 with the 50mm 1.4. The auto focus is downright horrible, and I manually focused about half the shots. Space constraints and the number of people made it difficult to create interesting compositions. Still, the appeal here was more in capturing the concentrated looks on the faces of writers. And in the end, I think that was enough to make the results at least somewhat interesting. 

Read on below the fold to see more shots. And please feel free to leave your thoughts.