My ventures into photography. C&C and advice welcome

Brabbinho

Brabbinho

Brabbinho

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25 Apr 2009
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1,689
Well from reading the state of the forum and competitions threads I thought I would start a thread to put some of my photo's as I take them. Hopefully with your guys critique and advice there will be improvement on display. Well at least that's my hope anyway....

At the moment I have had my DSLR just over a year and what to start taking consistently better shots and develop skills in post to enhance them. My current gear is a D7000 with 35mm 1.8 and 18-200 vr1 lenses with a newly purchased manfrotto 190xprob and 498RC2 combo. At the moment my main interests are landscape and urban scenes but I will look to branch out as I progress.

So anyway enough pre-amble and onto a few photo's. At the weekend I went out with newly bought tripod in hand to capture a few evening shots of Stanedge Edge in the Peak District.

1.
DSC_3539.jpg by JTFB Photography, on Flickr

2.
DSC_3481.jpg by JTFB Photography, on Flickr

3.
DSC_3557.jpg by JTFB Photography, on Flickr

For a first attempt at sunset photo's I am reasonably happy with the outcome, though I feel I will need to purchase some ND filters to improve the exposure of the sky and land. Of the three I like #1 the most perhaps not the best composition but I like how the light is falling on the sheep in the foreground. The second I was quite pleased how the edge leads you through the photo- though I feel it might be better processed in post.

Today I went to have a little go and freezing the movement of water. It was a very grey day so didn't lead to many exciting results, though I think I made decent strides in the technique itself. Here is the one of the results.

4.
DSC_3593.jpg by JTFB Photography, on Flickr
 
No.4 is nice (so are all the rest). I like that kind of shot though. I would say that maybe you can push the saturation and contrast a little more? It's great compositionally but possibly a bit flat, although that may be due to the time of year rather than the light. :)

2 and 3 are nice compositionally but I think they deserve shooting in better light (such as sunset or sunrise). Did you use a circular polariser?

EDIT: Just read that is was sunset (it only looks like sunset in the first one)! Maybe a nit more cloud would have made them a bit punchier? Also you have dust spots in the sky in those two, easy enough to clone out. :D

That sounds like very harsh criticism! I don't mean it to be, honest!:)
 
Best sheep photo I have ever come across haha, quite like it.

Can't see anything wrong with the attempt on number 4, looks as it should to me...

Edit: Agree pushing the contrast/colour might improve it some.
 
Great shots overall.
#1 is my fav, very nice lighting, good DoF, nice composition, sheep is looking right at the viewer, nice tones and warmth. However, it would be nicer if a little wider because the sheep's back feet are cut off at the bottom, and similar the hill to left is cropped at an awkward place.


#2 and #3 suffer from poor composition (IMO) because the sky line is at 50-50. I pointed this out in Alex's post as well. It rarely works well except for certain scenes where you need to emphasize symmetry. As it is the sky and the ground have equal weighting and importance, but this feels unbalanced. Is the sky more important, or the ground? In these cases it is the ground so I would like to see a larger portion of the image devoted to this.

#2 the para-gliders are just too small to make a strong subject
#3 the lighting isn't as nice because the immediate foreground is in shadow while the background is very bright. An ND-grad filter helps in these situation balance the exposure between very bright sky and darker foreground.

#4 is a classic but the processing is a little cold and lackluster. Lots of potential.

I find it very hard to get a good White balance in forests. You tend to loose a lot of the green by default because cameras always try to automatically create a neutral WB. The high Dynamic range also tend to make lots of highlights clip which further reduces colour and tone. I try to increase the green tone and pull back the highlights a little, up the saturation a tad - but that is a personal preference for richer colours. The composition is good
 
Thankyou for the feedback guys its really useful.

Next time I go out I'll think about where I place the horizon. As you rightly say D.P it splits the attention of the photo to neither one thing or another. I'm only a 15 minute drive from Stanedge so I shouldn't have any excuse to go out and practice.

I'll have another go at processing #4 though the main purpose of today's shooting was to practice exposure lengths etc.

@Amp34 Don't worry about the critique it wasn't harsh at all :) I don't have a polariser for the lens I had on (the 18-200) so will probably invest in one in the not to distant future.

@vail3r your sheep secret is safe with me ;)
 
Really like 1 and 4 for the reasons noted above.
2 just feels really flat, with no real point of interest to me.
3 is similar but the light is much nicer, so maybe redo with different perspective.

Maybe fiddle around with cropping them too.
Landscapes are not my forte but a simple crop improved a couple of so-so images for me.
 
ajf said:
Really like 1 and 4 for the reasons noted above.
2 just feels really flat, with no real point of interest to me.
3 is similar but the light is much nicer, so maybe redo with different perspective.

Maybe fiddle around with cropping them too.
Landscapes are not my forte but a simple crop improved a couple of so-so images for me.
Click to expand...

Partly this, but I feel that a wider perspective on the landscape shots would give you a better photo. Perhaps stitch a few photos together if you dont have a wider lens.
 
Very nice imo. Especially the sheep one. You have good sense of framing. I like the waterfall one too. Most people tend to over process those kinds of shots. I like the fact yours is quite natural.
 
@ JamesJ I actually have done a stitch but its still a work in progress... I think the sky needs cropping some more. In hindsight it probably needs 1 or 2 more frames to the left and more of the frame containing the ground rather than the sky. With out any ND's though I couldn't get any more to the left as it was pretty much looking into the sun. Anyway let me know what you guys think.

5.
Stanedge Pano 1 by JTFB Photography, on Flickr
 
Love the sheep shot (although that worries me a little) :D.

No 4 is a nice shot and excellently done but as DP says it needs to be brought to life with some TLC in post.
 
Inazuma said:
Very nice imo. Especially the sheep one. You have good sense of framing. I like the waterfall one too. Most people tend to over process those kinds of shots. I like the fact yours is quite natural.
Click to expand...

I don't think it is a natural look though. I'm pretty sure the colour stronger in reality.

My processing style is to keep things as close to reality as possible with a slight punchiness where appropriate, I want to replicate the feel of the scene. One thing I have learned is don't underestimated how vivid realty can be, and how your camera and LR imports try to minimize that. The thing to note is the raw photos you get from the camera don't match reality so you will have to process them to achieve that look. For starters, cameras have far less dynamic range than the human eye so without careful exposure and processing there is already a large difference.

In this case as I mentioned the camera will have done its best to choose a white balance and colour tone that is close to neutral grey (LR will use these values upon import). Much of the natural green in the scene has been reduced. Furthermore the specular highlights and bits of sky will have had more colour in reality but the color has been lost due to highlight clipping.

A carefully balanced processing should be able to produce a more natural looking photo that is less washed out and actually looks closer to reality while having more pop at the same time. This doesn't need much, just some slight tweaks.
 
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You raise a very good point about what is natural or not. I think I originally processed #4 to be quite neutral as my assumption is that is what natural would look like. I'd not really considered that the camera will neutralize the image through WB adjustments and raw processing.

I'm off to load lightroom to see if I can bring it to life a little more :)
 
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