Hi Ally,
I play guitar so I am naturally biased towards your image! Gutar players have dexterity and fluidity. The closeup works much better than the long shot. Your crop is perfect. Great job.   Posted: 07/18/2025 05:14:50

I also like the close up photo best. The composition is really good! My only suggestion would be - for this particular topic - would be to possibly tone down the color and brightness of the guitar since the focus was hands. (See attached image). The brighter version is more compelling generally though.
  Posted: 07/19/2025 23:56:36

I am glad that someone chose a closeup image of hands playing an instrument! I shoot a lot of musicians and had a few such that I was considering. I decided to go outside of the box for this one. Nice cropping to emphasize the hands, still leaving some room/space in the overall image.   Posted: 07/23/2025 19:27:48

The way the man is sitting there, it looks like the perfect pose begging to be photographed. To turn it into more than a snapshot, it takes only a little darkening and lightening of certain areas. I made the hands stand out by brightening them. I made little extraneous areas that were too bright disappear. Now I have a photo of hands playing the guitar. The background environment doesn't compete. I do this to most of my photos. I often use a brush on a mask in Photoshop Raw Filter, but you can do the same thing in LR. The goal is to make what's important to be easily visible and to make what's unnecessary to disappear into darkness or nothingness (like the bright area at bottom right). And just because his body was in the shade doesn't mean your photo has to be that dark. So, I brightened its overall exposure.   Posted: 07/28/2025 21:23:51