Opinions/Critique please. :)

[clouddancer]

Rather than post smaller versions here, I’ll instead link to the album. I’ve uploaded 14 pictures as they came off the camera, no cropping, balance adjustment or anything. I might be going a little overboard in picture taking, but I had some time today and there was sun instead of rain, so I went for it. In total, I’ve taken nearly 1500 pictures in just about a week, and 400 today alone. So yeah, I think I earned the overboard title. 😆

Anyway, I’d like some opinions, etc. I’ve been working on getting focus where I want it (shock, I’m using manual focus now, but not all the time yet), seeing how adjusting f/stops and shutter speed work in conjunction with the available lighting (hence all the outside stuff), and I’m turning into a macro freak when I’m not taking pictures of my kids. So, I’d like some thoughts, if you could spare a few moments. All these were with the 18-55 lens.

Thanks!

Well stupid me, it might help if I posted the album link. Getting my proverbial carriage before the horse.

Linky:
http://s141.photobucket.com/albums/r69/clouddancer19/new%20camera%20pics/

[ravnostic]

I like the focal point on #4. My choice would have been a shorter exposure on the first 4, though (really, I’d have popped to 100 and lengthened the exposure. I find color ‘pops’ more when I shoot that way. The tradeoff on lower ISO’s is the longer exposure, though, and on a breezy day that can be a problem, but I don’t think it would have for theses shots.

I love #5 and 6, the colors and lighting and focal points are really good there. 6 over 5, but only because I’m kinda getting big on the ‘rule of thirds’ thing (exceptions or not, it’s a good general rule.)

#7 is a good quality shot, but didn’t excite me as a composition.

#8 is spoiled by the wash-out brightness behind the flower. That can likely be improved post process, though.

#9 is good, but I prefer the lighting in #5-6. Also the green on the left is out of place, 5-6 don’t have that.

#10, however, benefits from that same lighting, by bringing the shadowed leaf into the frame as part of the impact. So far, I like that one best. 11’s good too.

#12 captures the seed filaments very nicely and is also very good.

#13 has beautiful colors (can I hear “Autumn” constest being taken?). But that stray pine needle…grrr. I take stuff all the time in macro and find all sorts of things I don’t see when taking the shot in the pictures. Sometimes they work, most of the time they don’t. 14 has the same problem, but it’s not as distracting with the blur.

Overall, you’re doing very well with the new toy! On macro, you can eek out considerably more DOF with higher f-stops and longer shutter times. Sometimes you’ll want to, others not. Depends of the DOF of the subject. Find a subject with lots of different depths and play with that.

One can never be too rich nor take too many pictures. I’ve learned 1/2 of that by heart, but haven’t won the lotto to test the other part for truth. I’m nearing my 25,000 picture myself, with no regrets at all the ones that aren’t quite ‘there’, for all the few that really are (or at least really close).

Last bit of a suggestion–delete the garbage shots NOW. After 10,000 have been taken, it’s a lot harder to make the time to do so.

[sleeping]

Suggestion 1: Pay attention to the background even if it is out of focus – 1 & 2 have a distracting red blob in the background. 5 and 6 have berry clusters in the background that are being chopped off at the edge of the frame. Those ould probably have been eliminated by moving the camera an inch or so.

Suggestion 2: If you can’t come pretty close to filling the frame with the subject, generally don’t put it in the center of the photo. Take a look at 11 – you have a relationship between the in focus berries in the center and the out of focus berries on the left, but that’s creating a lot of dead space on the right with nothing going on. Ideally you’d want to spread that relationship across much more of the image. (You could also crop it, of course, but it would be better not to have to.)

[Curious]

what they said generally. try to have a mental image of what the final print will look like. we tend to see what we want to when taking pictures. by that i mean you see some nice red berries and take a picture with them in the center. but as sleeping points out in # 11 that leaves dead space. fortunately it’s to the right and we don’t start looking in the right. anyway my point is that what you see at the moment of exposure and what your viewer see can be different if you don’t think of the final image as seen by someone else. try to look at ALL the frame for elements that work, or don’t, in your final image.

and do a bit of googling for the “rule of thirds”. you don’t have to follow it slavishly but it does make sense. i get criticized by my ex photo teaching sister for not following it but for me it’s a personal preference. like i said you don’t have to follow it but you should know about it.

last but not least — deleting. i shoot a ton of exposures and only delete those that are completely crap. the totally out of focus, the ones with my finger in front of the lens, etc. i have found uses for many of the others that weren’t a first choice originally. cropping can really be your friend here. a meh horizontal shot can be a good vertical shot when cropped. again personal preference but HDD space is cheap.

and for god’s sake and yours make backups. regularly. an external HDD, DVDs whatever but back your stuff up.

[clouddancer]

Some of these I had intended to crop as I could only get in so close to the subject. I should probably increase the DOF as I noticed when putting in the info about these that most were the same f/stop and the same ISO, so I do need to play with that some, get some variety. A good portion of these I manually focused. It’s rather easy to get the subject focused in the center because there are 3 focal points vertical. I like hearing that beeping when I get something in focus, which has been important with such a low f/stop. Hence the planning for crops with center focusing to bring the focus off center as I’m learning to manual focus.

I have been looking at pictures for Autumn, if it actually gets scheduled. I figured with this camera I can more accurately capture the brilliance of the colors that tends to come out here, so I’ve been trying to get those done while the colors are available.

I take the pictures then delete them after they’re on the hard drive. Hubby does that part beforehand, but I do it after. I’m definitely going to have to get more hard drive space on this machine. I have the cabling to add another SATA drive, but there was also talk of just giving me a bigger RAID drive in the first place, so I’m not sure how it will proceed. RAW pictures take up more space so I’ve been hesitant to use that setting.

Thank you for the feedback. It is appreciated. 🙂

[ravnostic]

You can get a Tb of plug-and-play backup drive at Fry’s for under $100; I’m very happy with mine.

[ennuipoet]

I concur about the backgrounds, it is easy to get tunnel visioned and concentrate on your foreground and miss elements being cut off. I do it all the time and it drives me nuts. I really liked the lighting in the berry shots, you caught the light and kept the detail in the shadows. Not always easy to do.

[orionid]

I haven’t read the above comments yet, so there may be some repeat info.

#1 I think would look better flipped horizontally.

#2 Feels a little off balanced.

#5 would look better with the berries off-center, could still be fixed by cropping. Cropping would also make the berries larger in relation to the rest of the image and draw more attention to them.

#10 awesome.

#13 and 14, slightly underexposed. This isn’t necessarily bad. Underexposure brings out more color saturation, you just have to bring up the contrast in post processing.

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