I would suggest that this is poor advice. Seeing your efforts through others’ eyes can’t possibly hurt. You don’t need to take the advice, but you did ask for it. “Great natural talent” is hyperbole when it’s based on three photographs.
You might try Shuttercity as a good forum to have other amateur and professional photographers critique your work (and you can return the favor). There is a lot of insight there and a lot of talent. I’ve posted about four pages and have appreciated the commentary.
You’ve got a good eye for light. The Paris photo of the Arc de Triomphe is nicely done; it appears to be marching into the photo. The Grand Canyon photo is a nice mood. And I like your cat, as well. You caught him/her in a good moment.
You need to clean your scanner bed and wipe your photos before scanning to get rid of the dust motes and what appear to be threads. If they are scratches on your photos, you can use the cloning tool on any digital photo program to get rid of them.
I really like the cinderblock. It looks like you’ve got some overexposed areas that could be fixed with some manipulating of the contrast levels. The barbed wire looks to be pixilated, probably from repeated compression of the file. I like the relaxed mood of your friend with the trees, which appear to cradle her. Have you tried a sepia tone with that one?
Aside: I resized the pictures in Photoshop Elements 4.0 to the dimensions that Mahaloh requested, but when I uploaded them to Photobucket, the dimensions changed.
Thanks. Looking back, it’s interesting how the good pictures aren’t the ones I expected when I was taking them. Sometimes they’re very fortunate accidents.
It’s not a bed scanner, like a photocopier, it just has a slot for 35mm film or slides; so I can’t really get in to clean it. And I know the film was clean when it went in. I may have to have it looked at. Some of the older shots are dirtier, but I think that was from the camera; it’s 40 years old. I’ve had it cleaned.
But part of it is I’m not really in the mindset of changing, cropping and processing the pictures. I’m used to thinking that they’re finished when I get them back from being developed. Altering them seems like cheating.
I understand your point. I seldom create anything that wasn’t there in the first place (unless I’m just playing around), but I look at cropping as being just another photo I’m shooting. People who have their own darkrooms do it all the time. In fact, the photo processor at Costco alters photos all the time by tweaking the saturation levels. I remember how pissed I was when I got back a film shot of a lake that was all in purples when I shot it, but the processor made it come out in browns.
I haven’t tried a sepia tone, but I will as soon as I have access to my home computer. The barbed wire is probably pixellated because I used a “sharpen” tool on it in Picasa, it made it look more real to me.
I notice you like to centre your subject. In all 3 photos there is a left/right split. This can work but the rule of thirds tends to produce more interesting compositions. Imagine a tic-tac-toe grid over your photo and place points of interest on the intersections. Once again this is not the only way to take photos but it is a better thing to fall back on than putting everything in the middle.
