Attempt at Photography

[Mr_snuffle]

Behold my attempt at photography.

Any thoughts? Suggestions? Comments?

James wants to learn, I have no photography experience.

(for informations sake, this was taken on a Canon S-50)

Made smaller to be thread friendly

http://mikesymonds.customer.netspace.net.au/photos/footprints.jpg

http://mikesymonds.customer.netspace.net.au/photos/eggsack.jpg

http://mikesymonds.customer.netspace.net.au/photos/stream.jpg

http://mikesymonds.customer.netspace.net.au/photos/deadpath.jpg

[Deco]

Attempt ??? :} These photos are wonderful! :)
Contrast, focus and colors are great!
I like very much the last!

[Mr_snuffle]

thanks, how do you think I could improve on them?

[Deco]

No crit here! Maybe you should post more to show more fully your stuff! :)

[mickhawkes]

Nice work well done
Mick

[JAUrrutia9]

The best advice I can give you is to enroll in a photography class. You're pictures are good, but you need to work on somethings. Depth of Field would add a lot to any of these pictures. But a class is always the best bet for someone looking to learn photography. Keep em coming man...

[lordarka]

thanks, how do you think I could improve on them?


Hmmm....

Well, since you asked;

Image 1 is boring compositionally. There is not much flow to the image at all, and there is no thematic or color consistency. It looks like a snapshot of a sidewalk, nothing more. The sky in that image is also overexposed. So... what could you do to improve it? I would suggest a few things; try to work with your perspective a little more, and get a feel for what you want to convey in the photograph. Also, when shooting outdoors, you are not at the mercy of the light. Landscape photographers choose the time of day to shoot very carefully, and will usually try to shoot in the early morning or late afternoon, when the light from the sun is still soft and directional, and there is color and warmth to the the light, and character to the shadows. You start to get some of these concepts in the last image, which I think is your best effort, but I think you could go further.

Image 2 is a decent shot, but once again, it fails to really inspire me. There is no place for my eye to rest really. Lighting is a little flat, and there are no intriguing shadows or standout colors. Exposure is quite strong.

Image 3 is a good effort, but it is suffering for a few things IMO. The sky is completely overexposed; it's at least 2 stops brighter than the stuff on the ground, which is clearly what your camera exposed for. You need to work to balance the exposure of the ground and sky. This is a very tricky thing to do, and it gives even experienced landscapers a great deal of trouble. There are hundred dollar graduated density filters made specifically to reduce sky exposure specifically because a bright day sky is so much brighter than the ground. A less expensive though more labor intensive solution is to meter for both the sky and the ground, and take two separate exposures from a tripod. You can then combine the exposures in Photoshop to render the dynamic range you can see but your camera can't.

Given your equipment, what I would try to do is learn how to use exposure compensation. You know the sky is going to get blown out, so you should expose for it instead, and then correct your camera's exposure by a stop or so, so that your ground does not simply appear as a black silhouette. With a well balanced exposure, you can at least get a modicum of information in the shadows and the highlights, and then start to massage the details back into the image in photoshop.

With digital photography, there is a lot information that 'hides' in the shadows and highlights, but in general, you want to expose for shadows as opposed to highlights. You can then use photoshop to reclaim some of that hidden information.

Another thing that will definitely help you with a scene like this is to, once again, choose your light carefully. Go back here in the late afternoon, right before sunset, and see how different it will look. I think you'll find the scene more interesting visually. Photographers don't shoot at lunchtime because the light is very bright and harsh, and tends to generate very strong highlights and very dark shadows. The camera can expose for one but not the other, and in the end your pictures don't look natural. Your eyes can compensate for midday lighting, but your camera can't, so you need to help it.

Image 4 is probably the best of the bunch compositionally, and you've handled a challenging exposure situation as well as you probably could have. Once again, I would try shooting this at a different time of day to get a softer quality to the light. As it is, the light is so bright that the details in the bark are lost, and the shadows are almost completely black.

Hope that helps!

Arka C.

[Ideaspark]

i'd have to agree with the Lord. thing about photography is you really have to decide WHAT you want to shoot. Then once you've decided you want to start throwing away elements that don't benefit your subject or message. You can do this by cropping/zooming or choosing new angles and perspectives, and as a last resort in the darkroom. Thing is sometimes you can't get a decent shot of what you want, always powerlines or whatever in the BG, sometimes you just have to find a new subject.

If you want to really try your hand at getting into photography, try some black and white film, and shoot a portrait of a freind in window light, take a whole roll just of that scene and see what you come up with.