You are not being overly critical. In fact it is very encouraging to get at least some positive feedback from a pro. Thankyou.
And how can a person improve without negative feedback? Positive feedback tells you what you already got right. If you already got it right there is no room to improve.
The car is my most disappointing thing about the pigeon picture. I didn’t think about it at the time, If I did I probably could have got the pigeon without the car, or with a better background alltogether (the pigeon sure stayed long enough).
I am quite humbled to be getting feedback/advice from pros. I am barely an enthusiast (I am not saying I am not enthusiatic, just that I am just a guy with a camera)
You have an interesting portfolio. I liked the wide-angle shot of the Serbian woman sipping coffee, and the shot within the house where a man is in the mirror smoking while the woman enters. I also liked the last flower close-up. B&W works splendidly here. Your still-life interests are shall we say, too modern for me!
Keep up the good work.
P.S: I shoot on and off but recently am mired in an inactive slump, mainly from frustration that it seems to be going nowhere. May be when the enjoy-the-process innocence comes back, I shall be on the road again.
Lobsang
You have all the enthusiasm necessary. Your current photos are, shall we say, dormant. I am confident you will soon start to find interesting subjects, lighting and composition. I strongly suggest reading a good technical book to get a grip on the form.
I am like you, Lobsang—an amateur. Just someone with a camera. And like you, I take a lot of pictures of a beautiful place. You can’t really go that wrong with Yosemite. But to be fair to myself, I’ve seen a lot of mediocre Yosemite photos, and I think that many of my photos are a bit better than mediocre. You can see a few of my photos by clicking on the web link in my profile.
I agree with pulykamell on your photos—though of course he put it much better than I would have, and he has more insights that I would have. But I think you have some nice pictures there, to be sure.
I don’t have many tips to share with you (since I am not a pro) but I have had a little luck selling my photos. A few of you may remember that I sold a photo to Toyota last year. (I’ve also gotten a few nibbles from other publishers, and just sold a photo to be used on a text book cover.) So, in a vague sense, because of these few professional sales, I am a “professional”. (Cough cough.) Yeah right…
My secret, (as an “amateur” photograher) to getting enough attention to sell these photos, was to have a good web site. Well, a decent website. (I am not a professional web designer). And I got my own domain name. Not a www.someoneelse’sdomain.com/~yosemitebabe/photos.html, but my OWN domain. All mine. And I got a book showing me how to design my site so it’ll show up high in search engines. I learned how to use Photoshop. Someone else on SDMB also suggested that I buy the book “photos.com” (it’s on Amazon.com) and I found that really helpful too.
I second the advice about using slide film. I don’t use it as much as I should, but I know it is the best. The color is much better.
One thing I do a lot (and I don’t know whether you do this or not) is wander around to get just the right shot. Just the right composition. And I take A LOT of photos. Different exposures. Different angles. I burn up a lot of film. I keep walking and walking and often discovering that if I move just 10 feet in one direction that the tree position looks so much better, and so I take another couple of pictures, and a couple more 10 feet or so past that. I don’t know if everyone does this, but if you are taking scenic photos, I can’t imagine that it’s a bad idea. Be adventuresome—keep walking and wandering and seeing how the composition changes.
Almost a semi-pro as I am starting to get some paying work but sorry, none of my work online because I’ve already been burned by clients stealing my work.
I recently reaffirmed my decision not to be a wedding photographer by shooting a friend’s wedding. The bride happens to be a full time professional photojournalist. No pressure huh? Whee. It actually went better than I expected. I had no opportunity to rehearse to had to fly by the seat of my pants. It was a backyard ceremony and I was lucky just to squeeze between all the guest and get shots of the ceremony at all let alone the decent ones I got. I mainly concentrnate on portraiture in my own work so put some effort into that in a hastlily assembled studio in the garage. She’ll be shooting our wedding in March then a week later we decided to share the duties shooting another mutual friend’s wedding. She wants to go into wedding photography full time and leave photojournalism. She won’t have to worry about competition from me.
I consider myself a semi-pro, although serious amateur might also work. I don’t take photos for a living but I’ve sold quite a few at art shows and a couple of galleries. I rarely do commissions, and I’ve done one and only one wedding. I have great respect for wedding photographers, noot just for the actual shooting but for the people skills involved. A good wedding photographer would also make a good choreographer.
I don’t have a web page of my own right now, but some of my pictures can be seen at this one.
This is spot-on, actually. It’s kind of expected with photography that you’ll be taking a LOT more photos than you’ll ever actually use. National Geographic on average will go through 10,000 photos to get the 10 or 12 they publish for a particular article (so says my photo instructor, who’s been in the biz for 30+ years so I’m inclined to believe he knows what he’s talking about). For myself, and I imagine most other photogs, I’m really happy if I get one or two good shots out of a roll of 36. Great shots are few and far between. I’ve taken entire rolls which ended up being nothing but boring tripe. But then that’s part of the process.
Film is cheap. The perfect photo op is rare. You don’t want to miss it because of some notion that you should “conserve” film.
I have just re-read the tech info and noticed that it’s zoom range (35-210) is quite decent. Before I read the book they were just numbers to me, but now I’ve read some of the book they actually mean something!
I have had the camera for months and the book for a couple of days (gift from dad). I haven’t taken any pictures since I got the book (so it’s not as if I have been ignoring the book’s help)
I do what people here have said they do - Take lots and lots of pictures and keep the good ones.
If I never become a ‘good’ photographer I will still do it, because I like many of the pictures I take. I like the fact that there is no presure to take a saleable picture.
I may be going to Liverpool soon, so I hope to get some good ones there (mainly of some of the magnificent old buildings there.)
Lobsang: your digital camera sounds nice! And 3 Megapixel is respectable these days. Glad to know you burn up the film by taking lots of photos! (Or, in your case, the pixels!)
I have a 2 Megapixel digital camera, but I haven’t even turned it on yet! I think that 2 megapixel is OK for the web, but it would not be good for print work, since (my vague Photoshop calculations tell me) the best resolution it would produce would be 4 x 5" at 300 dpi (?). Or something like that. Personally, I don’t think I’d use a digital camera as a “substitute” for my emulsion camera until it would do 11 x 14" at 300 dpi. Or at least 8 x 10". (But that seems too small, to be honest.)
I know when I sold my photo to the agency working for Toyota, they were really relieved to hear that I used “regular” film, not digital. Obviously professional photographers are switching to digital all the time, but the price of a good digital camera is beyond my budget. (What are the stats of a viable professional level digital camera, anyway? Anyone?)
The ones the newspaper uses are thousands of dollars (US$4,000 just for the body, according to Gun, plus the lenses at another $500-1,000 a pop). The highest-end one we sell at the store where I work has 5.2 mp and is US$1500. (Meaning it’s one of the most expensive things in the store, and I don’t think we actually have one in stock - just a non-working display to let people know that we can get those cameras from our mail-order. The paperwork on it says it will print 11x17 prints at full resolution.)
Can you imagine how much it would cost to get a digital camera that would be capable of the same resolution as Gunslinger’s Speed Graphic? (Which uses 4x5 sheet film. To get the same resolution as a 35mm 8x10 print, you could blow a 4x5 negative up to 30x40. That’s kinda cool, because you could paint the photo-paper emulsion stuff onto a car hood and print the photo on there, and that would be awesome… I wonder what it works out to in megapixels.)
Mind you, I know what I know only because Gun likes to talk about the mechanics of photography. He’ll probably be along shortly to correct things I’ve misunderstood.
FTR, Lobsang, I like the pigeon picture for its color scheme (and because I think pigeons are cool when they’re not pooping on me or bothering me for french fries).
**The ones the newspaper uses are thousands of dollars (US$4,000 just for the body, according to Gun, plus the lenses at another $500-1,000 a pop). **
Nikon D1H ($3000-$3600) and D1x ($4600+) models, with 2.75 and 5.something megapixels, respectively. The lenses we use are $700 and $1150.The resolution may not be all that high, but they’ve got all the features of a top-of-the-line film SLR, and can take a good bit more abuse than the average consumer camera (and we beat the crap out of 'em). The Canon D30 (3mp) and D60 (6mp), and the new Nikon D100 (6mp) are a bit cheaper ($2000-ish), but not quite as sturdy and just don’t feel right to me (lighter, slower, not as full-featured). Kodak’s just announced (it’ll be on sale later this year) a 14-megapixel pro SLR that’ll use Nikon lenses and has a 24x36mm chip, so the lense focal lengths are 35mm-film-equivalent, and it’ll retail around $4500. Me want.
Try to get a copy of last month’s issue of Popular Photography magazine. It has reviews of all the new cameras. …I wonder what [4x5 film] works out to in megapixels.)
It doesn’t, really, but the current thinking is that 14mp is as good as 35mm film, so we do some simple multiplication (4x5 is 13.3 times the area of a 35mm frame, so 14x13.3=189) and get an estimate of about 190 megapixels. And that’s the low-end estimate; if you’re making really big prints, film can go a bit past the point where 14mp starts to look pixelated.
I take some pictures. I’m not a professional photographer or anything, as I’ve never sold a picture, but I do take some pictures. I bought a digital camera last summer precisely because I enjoy taking pictures so much, and film was costing me more than I was making at the time.
It’s a decent digital camera for what I use it for. It’s a Cannon Powershot S200, one of the Digital Elphs. Basically, it’s tiny and takes acceptable resolution pictures. Its dimensions are something like 3.5 in. wide by 2.25 in. tall by 1 in. thick. Pretty darn small. It’ll take pictures (at its highest settings) that print out as acceptable (to me, anyway) 8x10s. They probably wouldn’t be acceptable quality to sell or for a magazine or something, but I certainly can’t see any defects.
Anyway, the reason I like the camera (and subsequently why I take so many pictures) is that it’s so small that I take it everywhere. Really. When I go out, I check and make sure I’ve got my wallet, my palm pilot, and my camera. And my spare battery and spare CompactFlash card. When I see a good picture, I pull out my camera and snap away.
I’ve taken a few professional-looking photos (in my opinion), and perhaps I’ll set up a site when I get back to school to let you all chime in as well. I went to Indiana Beach (small amusement park) at the end of last summer and spent the day taking photos. I took maybe 30 or 40. My mind wasn’t really on taking professional or artsy photos, it was more on documenting all the rides and things in the park. I did end up with about 3 really nice shots, though, and I’m proud of them.
I’ll end with a question:
What are the rules or guidelines or whatever for retouching/manipulating professional photos with Photoshop or whatever? I know in my newspaper at college if we manipulate them at all, other than changing the brightness/contrast/etc., we have to label them as “photo illustrations” instead of photos. I was just wondering how this translates into photos you might sell one day or something. (I have this weird premonition of somone stumbling across my site, offering me thousands of dollars for the perfect photo they’ve been looking for for whatever reason, and then retracting because it’d been edited in Paint Shop Pro)
Garfield: I can’t speak for what the “rules” are really, but I worked as a photo retoucher at a professional photo lab a few years ago. (We didn’t use Photoshop—the lab was too cheap—we used photo dyes and traditional retouching supplies.)
We often worked on professional photographers’ work. Scenic photos, wedding photos, portraits, etc. Not a lot of other types of photos, though. (And not that many scenic photos, to be honest.) We did things like open the eyes on someone who had blinked when the flash went off (I was usually the “eye opener” at work), made the sky bluer, removed offensive flagpoles or other elements in a picture that the photographer thought was distracting, etc. etc. We enhanced the photo. Made it look a little better, but not unrecognizable from the original. Of course, removing wrinkles from people’s faces was an everday thing for us.
I don’t know if that answers your question, but all I know is that I do the same kind of retouching work (with Photoshop) on my own photos, and have no problem with it. I’ve retouched friends’ and relatives’ faces (before I email them the photos I took of them) and they never catch on that I’ve made them look just a little bit better. Man, I love Photoshop.
I should say, at the photo lab I worked at, we usually worked on professional photographer’s work. From all over the country. Hobby photographers could not afford us.
I’ve cloned out more than a few blemishes and a hell of a lot of spots caused by dirt in the camera, erased the seams between panels of a wall, tweaked the color balance/contrast a lot (made a dark almost-silhouette out of a slightly overexposed photo of a hot-air balloon), and have seen a person painted out of a photo for the school paper (was of the press conference with football players signing with colleges; a guy was going through a door in the background and was edited out). That last is usually frowned upon, but it was allowed because it was just bad timing, and really distracting. Usually, you’re not supposed to change anything big or do anything that would change the meaning, but it really depends on the editor’s judgement, and how many readers complained last time you did it (like the time National Geographic moved the pyramids around; that’ll probably never happen again).
Of course, if it’s art, you can do anything you want to it, though most contests have seperate categories for altered images. I wonder where they draw the line between “real” and “enhanced”.
I love photography. But I hated working for our local newspaper. We were a small-budget paper, and my boss didn’t like buying and developing a lot of film, so more often than not I was forced to use a digital camera. It was a nice digital camera (I was told it costed about $1500), but I preferred the 35mm over it. I refused to use a digital for sporting events (my specialty), because the digital didn’t capture the action like the 35mm did. One of the main reasons why I left the job was because I wasn’t allowed to use the 35mm as much as I wanted to. I couldn’t take pride in a blurry basketball picture with my name under it.