Focusing attention

This is a shot of a street in New Orleans where people are out for a Sunday morning stroll.  I took this with an Olympus PEN E-P3 and 17mm/35mm lens.  It's just a typical street photo, nothing special, but it captures a slice of life in the Big Easy.

Well, the slice of life where people are not staggering around half-naked and throwing up everywhere, anyway.

I wanted to point out a couple of things in the composition that make this photo work (to whatever extent you think it works, that is).

NoLa is a colorful place, which is why I used the color version of the photo at the top of the post.  But to discuss composition, I want to switch to black and white so as not to be distracted by the colors.

So, here's the thing about this composition.  The leading lines are taking your eye down the street, like so:

BUT, you have the couple pushing the stroller in the foreground on the left of the frame, and they are interesting.  They are moving against the flow, so to speak.  They are walking toward the viewer, where everybody else is walking away.  Also, they are fighting against the leading lines in the photo. They are swimming upstream.

Look at the photo for a minute (one of the ones without my red markups) and think about where your eye is going.  Hopefully, you eye is moving around the photo, but there should be an axis where it stays most of the time.  I think it should be like this:

Your eye can't decide which is more interesting, the couple in the foreground that you can see clearly, or what is going on down the street, which is sort of at the limit of your ability to discern details.

And that indecision, that back and forth motion of the eye, that's what provides the tension and hopefully the interest in the photo that helps you feel the situation.  And, just to help it out a little we'll darken the upper left and lower right corners of the frame to force your eye more into that line of tension, like so: