Tell me I'm a bad photographer

[mrSHEiK124]

I need tips.


School by SHEiK124, on Flickr


The Devil's House by SHEiK124, on Flickr


Rust by SHEiK124, on Flickr


Maghrib by SHEiK124, on Flickr


Qalandiya RC Masjid (Dome) by SHEiK124, on Flickr


Olives by SHEiK124, on Flickr


IMG_1726_DxO by SHEiK124, on Flickr


IMG_1729_DxO by SHEiK124, on Flickr

 

[mrSHEiK124]

Older stuff:


Skyway by SHEiK124, on Flickr


Nerd by SHEiK124, on Flickr


backlit foliage by SHEiK124, on Flickr

 

[angry hampster]

Halos in HDR = nasty. HDR is designed to maximize the definition near your shadows and highlights.

Also, don't hesitate to keep stuff out-of-center. Use the 'rule of thirds'.

 

[mrSHEiK124]

Marshall Student Center by SHEiK124, on Flickr

Tried some night exposure yesterday.

 

[angry hampster]

Really nice actually. Water looks good.

 

[finbarqs]

you're a bad photographer

 

[gdansk]

I'm not a photographer myself. The only photograph that stands out as lesser quality, would be the snapshot of the monitor. I'd imagine the extreme change in lighting (from bright monitor to pitch black) causes that. Sorry, I have no advice on how to improve.

 

[mrSHEiK124]

Really nice actually. Water looks good.

thanks! I need to think of more places to take decent 30s+ exposures. I see that building nearly every day.

you're a bad photographer

Thank you, but why lol

I'm not a photographer myself. The only photograph that stands out as lesser quality, would be the snapshot of the monitor. I'd imagine the extreme change in lighting (from bright monitor to pitch black) causes that. Sorry, I have no advice on how to improve.

True, that one is a bit of a turd. I couldn't get the monitor dim enough for the surroundings.

 

[Krynj]

That HDR image looks awful. Looks like some gaudy outline edge filter from Paint Shop Pro.

HDR looks nice when done well, but that's just way too much.

Other shots are nice though.

 

[slashbinslashbash]

School could have used a bit more exposure. The window is already getting blown out, just go ahead and blow it all the way out so you can see some more details in the kids' faces.

Devil's House is pretty plain and doesn't tell much of a story. If you wanted to focus on the collapsed building then you should have lifted the camera up over the fence to get an unobstructed shot. If the point of the photo is to include the posters then I would have gone wider-angle, get closer to one end of the fence so that the closest poster appears larger, and chose your DOF so as to have the building in the background be a little OOF. Not entirely, but enough that one or more of the posters "pop" in sharp focus to contrast with the building. Or do the opposite and have the building in sharp focus while the posters are OOF. What you do as a photographer is about selection. You select your subject to take a photo, but if you have more than one potential subject in a photo, you should try to emphasize one or the other. Sometimes you can do this with DOF, sometimes you can do it by going wide-angle and getting really close to one object while the other one appears much smaller in the background but is still recognizable.

Rust is great, I like it.

Maghrib, I mostly like it except that the red reflection of the car's taillights on the ground is too strong. I like the HDR effect to "dirty up" what looks like an already dirty environment. But the red glow on the ground needs to be toned down a lot, it overstates the HDR. (Not that the HDR is subtle to begin with -- I like it for its comic-book-like extremes. But the glow on the ground takes me "out of the moment" so to speak. Same thing for the glow around the wheel of the vehicle at the bottom left of the frame. The rest of it looks fine.)

Qalandiya looks great at small resolution (640x480 or so), but blowing it up to full size you start to see some focus issues (unless the paint is actually fuzzy around the edges, which is possible). Partially this could be the fault of the lens, especially at the corners (I look at the "sun" on the left edge of the frame, it looks really blurry) and some of the blue and green diamonds especially on the top left and top right of the frame. Now that I look at it closer, it appears that this is probably the fault of the lens and nothing that you could have corrected for. Overall I like the composition and think it's a good photo.

Olives I like overall, but I think it could be improved by being level with the ground (tilted horizon). I know the tilted thing is being "jaunty" or "playful" but you've already got an off-balance composition (which I like) and I think the tilt is too much. Also I would crop out or otherwise remove the white building on the left edge of the frame, and maybe those two trees next to it.

IMG_1726, I would crop out the left half of the image entirely. The curving sign post silhouetted against the sky and the building is the interesting part of the composition here. The tree and the other stuff on the left don't add anything to it.

IMG_1729, nothing special about it. It's a totally typical, unimaginative photo. Nothing wrong with that, we all take them, especially when travelling, but it's not one that I would choose for display. If anything I would say crop it. Get the middle 1/3rd of the image (so you have the trees on one side and the buildings on the other -- forget the lamp post) and then crop out the lower 1/5 or so of that one, to get rid of the cars. Also you may have used a bit too slow of a shutter speed, I would have gone with ISO 200 or 400 and upped the shutter speed correspondingly. Some of the trees look blurry (esp. on the left edge, although that's likely mostly due to the lens) and it could be due to wind or other motion. 1/200 or 1/400 would have done a better job stopping it, if it was indeed present.

At this point I would actually say that you should probably send your 17-55 in to Canon to get it calibrated or replaced. The left side is dreadful. Also you should try stopping it down a bit more. A street scene in daytime should be at least f/8 unless you are going for some specific DOF effects. Bump your ISO to 200 or 400, it won't visibly affect the quality.

Skyway: Looks good, nice interplay of light. Only thing that comes to mind that might improve it would to do some creative cropping to make it a short and wide ("panoramic" style) image instead of the standard 3:2 ratio. You've got a lot of solid black at the bottom that you could crop out, and taking out an equal amount of the sky at the top wouldn't hurt. Might make it a bit more dramatic to have the bridge fill more of the perceived frame.

Nerd: calls for a simple HDR or really just a copy and paste/compositing of 2 images with different exposures. You could still fix it by finding some image of a computer screen, scaling it and tilting it so that it fits in the space of the monitor. Same for the small display in the left foreground.

backlit foliage: Not bad, a little blah, but not bad. IMO it is a little too busy, the subject (the brown leaves) is not isolated enough in the frame. Cropping to just the middle 1/3rd (removing the left and right sides) might help.

Marshall Student Center, I like it a lot, the only thing that catches my eye and stands out as somehow "wrong" is the fuzzy bit by the bull's left hoof. I guess the water was kind of splashing there or something? You might be able to minimize it with some PS work... the black lettering in the back left "Phyllis" something is also a distraction, you could remove it pretty easily, just make the whole building white and get rid of the dark letters.

 

[mrSHEiK124]

School could have used a bit more exposure. The window is already getting blown out, just go ahead and blow it all the way out so you can see some more details in the kids' faces.

Devil's House is pretty plain and doesn't tell much of a story. If you wanted to focus on the collapsed building then you should have lifted the camera up over the fence to get an unobstructed shot. If the point of the photo is to include the posters then I would have gone wider-angle, get closer to one end of the fence so that the closest poster appears larger, and chose your DOF so as to have the building in the background be a little OOF. Not entirely, but enough that one or more of the posters "pop" in sharp focus to contrast with the building. Or do the opposite and have the building in sharp focus while the posters are OOF. What you do as a photographer is about selection. You select your subject to take a photo, but if you have more than one potential subject in a photo, you should try to emphasize one or the other. Sometimes you can do this with DOF, sometimes you can do it by going wide-angle and getting really close to one object while the other one appears much smaller in the background but is still recognizable.

Rust is great, I like it.

Maghrib, I mostly like it except that the red reflection of the car's taillights on the ground is too strong. I like the HDR effect to "dirty up" what looks like an already dirty environment. But the red glow on the ground needs to be toned down a lot, it overstates the HDR. (Not that the HDR is subtle to begin with -- I like it for its comic-book-like extremes. But the glow on the ground takes me "out of the moment" so to speak. Same thing for the glow around the wheel of the vehicle at the bottom left of the frame. The rest of it looks fine.)

Qalandiya looks great at small resolution (640x480 or so), but blowing it up to full size you start to see some focus issues (unless the paint is actually fuzzy around the edges, which is possible). Partially this could be the fault of the lens, especially at the corners (I look at the "sun" on the left edge of the frame, it looks really blurry) and some of the blue and green diamonds especially on the top left and top right of the frame. Now that I look at it closer, it appears that this is probably the fault of the lens and nothing that you could have corrected for. Overall I like the composition and think it's a good photo.

Olives I like overall, but I think it could be improved by being level with the ground (tilted horizon). I know the tilted thing is being "jaunty" or "playful" but you've already got an off-balance composition (which I like) and I think the tilt is too much. Also I would crop out or otherwise remove the white building on the left edge of the frame, and maybe those two trees next to it.

IMG_1726, I would crop out the left half of the image entirely. The curving sign post silhouetted against the sky and the building is the interesting part of the composition here. The tree and the other stuff on the left don't add anything to it.

IMG_1729, nothing special about it. It's a totally typical, unimaginative photo. Nothing wrong with that, we all take them, especially when travelling, but it's not one that I would choose for display. If anything I would say crop it. Get the middle 1/3rd of the image (so you have the trees on one side and the buildings on the other -- forget the lamp post) and then crop out the lower 1/5 or so of that one, to get rid of the cars. Also you may have used a bit too slow of a shutter speed, I would have gone with ISO 200 or 400 and upped the shutter speed correspondingly. Some of the trees look blurry (esp. on the left edge, although that's likely mostly due to the lens) and it could be due to wind or other motion. 1/200 or 1/400 would have done a better job stopping it, if it was indeed present.

At this point I would actually say that you should probably send your 17-55 in to Canon to get it calibrated or replaced. The left side is dreadful. Also you should try stopping it down a bit more. A street scene in daytime should be at least f/8 unless you are going for some specific DOF effects. Bump your ISO to 200 or 400, it won't visibly affect the quality.

Skyway: Looks good, nice interplay of light. Only thing that comes to mind that might improve it would to do some creative cropping to make it a short and wide ("panoramic" style) image instead of the standard 3:2 ratio. You've got a lot of solid black at the bottom that you could crop out, and taking out an equal amount of the sky at the top wouldn't hurt. Might make it a bit more dramatic to have the bridge fill more of the perceived frame.

Nerd: calls for a simple HDR or really just a copy and paste/compositing of 2 images with different exposures. You could still fix it by finding some image of a computer screen, scaling it and tilting it so that it fits in the space of the monitor. Same for the small display in the left foreground.

backlit foliage: Not bad, a little blah, but not bad. IMO it is a little too busy, the subject (the brown leaves) is not isolated enough in the frame. Cropping to just the middle 1/3rd (removing the left and right sides) might help.

Marshall Student Center, I like it a lot, the only thing that catches my eye and stands out as somehow "wrong" is the fuzzy bit by the bull's left hoof. I guess the water was kind of splashing there or something? You might be able to minimize it with some PS work... the black lettering in the back left "Phyllis" something is also a distraction, you could remove it pretty easily, just make the whole building white and get rid of the dark letters.

Finally! A real "critique"

That 17-55 was a rental, thank God. I now see what you're talking about and didn't notice it before. I have a lot of trouble with composition, leads to a majority of boring pictures and only a few keepers.

Everyone complaining about the "HDR shot" didn't exactly help me figure out which one it was (hint: they are all HDR). The "Maghrib" shot was intentionally over-saturated, the original picture was underexposed.

The fuzzy bits by the bull's hooves = there are fountains underneath the hooves. That's what they look like @ 30 sec exposure. I love ultra-wide pictures but I still need practice.

 

[slashbinslashbash]

One trick that I sometimes use when I know I'm getting too many boring compositions is to switch my focus point. I use the center focus point almost 100% of the time, especially in dynamic situations (the center point is much more sensitive, and therefore it focuses more accurately), but when I'm shooting a static subject and don't have any focussing issues, I will just rotate through my focus points one at a time and place them on my subject and go with whatever framing comes up, zooming in or out if necessary. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it gets me thinking about moving my subject around in the frame.

Another way to get thinking more creatively about framing is to use a prime lens, especially in the normal to mild telephoto range. When you have a zoom lens, you tend to get the same photo over and over again.... there is a "safe framing" that gets all or most of the subject in the frame. If you have something like a fixed 85mm or 50mm or 100mm then you are limited in your choices and often can't get the whole subject in the frame, forcing you to pick and choose. This works especially well at parties and the like (where you often need the faster lens anyway) as you have to snap a shot at the moment that you see it, framing be damned. A lot of very interesting people shots are what most would normally consider too zoomed-in; showing just the face, cutting off the top of the head or other parts of the body.

Any time that you have a "near-far" subject relationship then that is a good time to experiment with DOF effects and UWA effects. With a UWA (such as a 17mm equivalent) you can get ridiculously close to one object and still see a lot more of the stuff around it. You can actually get right up into people's faces (around 2 feet or so), and it will look to them as if you're shooting "past" them to the side, but they're actually well in the frame and probably dominating one-third to one-half of it. (Of course you probably only want to do this with friendly/posed subjects.) When I am trying for those UWA shots I often bump right up against the MFD (minimum focus distance) of the lens in question, which is right around 1 foot.

 

[aphex]

Looks good! Since you posted a pic of the Skyway I just wanted to add mine here too

 

[mrSHEiK124]

Looks good! Since you posted a pic of the Skyway I just wanted to add mine here too

Amazing colors! When was this? I took mine in the middle of the night (fishing trip), I couldn't get anything but the streetlights.

 

[Cienja]

I like your photos. Good job.

 

[iGas]

na

 

[iGas]

1. I would have use both side of the door frame to frame the shot, increase DOF to take in the entire class with a wide angle, or accentuate the boy in the front with shallow DOF and telephoto to compress the scene while maintain door framing. Fill flash could also be employ to to increase saturation.

2. It is good that you show the destruction of the building behind and the posters in front, but it is hard to know which is the main subject in the shot. Could try shooting more on an angle and show more background building with the front posters are slightly blur to make the building in the background the focal point.

3. The door have potential, but odd framing with brightly lit back ground (random look).

4. Have potential for a good posterization image. I would wait and shoot a few more shots later so that the lights in front of the buildings would have a stronger effect, as well as burn in the center of the street to give it that eire feel.

5. Look like a random picture.

6. High contrast & posterization may work for a stalk look, with more DOF for the entire frame tighter/closer to the foreground tree with telephoto for a compressed look, or back up a bit and an ultrawide shot with high contrast for posterization and low DOF for a stronger focal point. (Try fill flash on the left from bottom makes sure that it doesn't lose the shadow of tree on the ground may enhance the contrast look)

7. Random shot

8. No focal point, street with nothing. Could try re framing and different lens with red car as 1/3 x 1/3 or 1/5 x 1/3 for focal point.

PS. Get books, take more pictures, enroll in photography classes.

Good luck

Below is a very nice picture of your. Also, try wider lens if you can retake the image.

Much better shot & framing than the above empty street/trees/cars shot.

 

[mrSHEiK124]

1. I would have use both side of the door frame to frame the shot, increase DOF to take in the entire class with a wide angle, or accentuate the boy in the front with shallow DOF and telephoto to compress the scene while maintain door framing. Fill flash could also be employ to to increase saturation.

2. It is good that you show the destruction of the building behind and the posters in front, but it is hard to know which is the main subject in the shot. Could try shooting more on an angle and show more background building with the front posters are slightly blur to make the building in the background the focal point.

3. The door have potential, but odd framing with brightly lit back ground (random look).

4. Have potential for a good posterization image. I would wait and shoot a few more shots later so that the lights in front of the buildings would have a stronger effect, as well as burn in the center of the street to give it that eire feel.

5. Look like a random picture.

6. High contrast & posterization may work for a stalk look, with more DOF for the entire frame tighter/closer to the foreground tree with telephoto for a compressed look, or back up a bit and an ultrawide shot with high contrast for posterization and low DOF for a stronger focal point. (Try fill flash on the left from bottom makes sure that it doesn't lose the shadow of tree on the ground may enhance the contrast look)

7. Random shot

8. No focal point, street with nothing. Could try re framing and different lens with red car as 1/3 x 1/3 or 1/5 x 1/3 for focal point.

PS. Get books, take more pictures, enroll in photography classes.

Good luck

Below is a very nice picture of your. Also, try wider lens if you can retake the image.

Much better shot & framing than the above empty street/trees/cars shot.

I don't think I'll be able to retake the shots in Haiti, the others maybe in the summer (all travel shots). I didn't have a flash when I took the tree shot, it was real spur of the moment and I think I mistakenly left my polarizer on (weird sky).

Good tips though. I take too many random shots, without thinking about composition.

 

[aphex]

Amazing colors! When was this? I took mine in the middle of the night (fishing trip), I couldn't get anything but the streetlights.

Sunrise in 2005, probably around 6am or so.

 

[shocksyde]

I like most of the pictures... why are you so hard on yourself? haha

If you really want people to rip you up, go to the POTN forums.

 

[amarksa]

These are all great photos.

 

[gsellis]

If you were shooting for a magazine, you would get this... "Horizon, horizon, horizon... use the bubble on your tripod." Maghrib and Olives would be the best examples. The Devil's House has too much headroom maybe and the story gets muddled? In School, the boy smiling at the camera pops at the viewer. Get him to be better balanced.