The 2nd Annual "Critique My Photos" Thread

In My Humble Opinion
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Just about a year ago I started this thread asking for feedback regarding my newfound love of photography.

Well, one year, a new digital SLR, and a bunch of photos later, I am back before you to humbly ask you to critique a new set of photos. Also, as before, if anyone else wants to submit their photos for critical feedback they are more than welcome to do so.

So, without further adieu, let me present:

Wet and Dry

Two Turtles

Nightmare! (One of my very favorites)

Whooping Crane

Atitlan Dock

Mayan Girl

Bloom

Drying Coffee

Astrological Clock (Prague) (Another personal favorite)

And finally portraits of my sons:

The Elder Ashling

Ash the Younger

Thank you in advance for any and all feedback.

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Cool, EvilAsh. I really like Mayan Girl, Drying Coffee and the pictures of your kids. The first one is neat too. As is the clock.

Looks like your focus point is a little off on the crane picture. His head is less in focus then his buttular area.

What SLR are you using? I have a Nikon D50. I suck at it, but it’s fun to play with! Some friends of mine are really good photographers and got me into it. I never have enough time anymore though. Here’s a few from last summer when I first got the camera - haven’t used it much since, unfortunately. I think some have been posted up before - not sure. All the stuff I’ve taken recently has been family photos from the holidays and photos of my friends partying, haha.

St. Louis

Lens cap

Kitchen table

Flower

The BFFs

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I love digital photography, and it’s a hobby I’d like to get into some more. But I can’t afford my own camera right now, so it’s a hobby I live vicariously through others.

I love most of the photos you’ve posted for us there. I’d have to say that my favourites are Nightmare, Atitlan Dock, Mayan Girl and Ash the Younger.

The first three have spot-on composition, and you’ve got a real eye for colours. I’d love to know how you got the spider on the red background like that. Is there any sort of editing you did? And the picture of the Mayan Girl is just gorgeous. She’s so happy looking and the colour of the wall behind her and her clothes just make the whole image really pop.

With the photo of your younger son, I think it’s a beautiful portrait shot. He looks a little less than impressed to be photographed like that, and it gives it a real impact. I think the use of black and white in that photo was a good choice. The only thing that lets it down is that cabinet-thing in the bottom right corner. In the black and white your son’s face really stands out from the darker shades of the leaves and the bricks, but the white thing tends to draw the eye away from him and I think lessens the impact. If you edit your photos, my thought would be to try and clone or crop that out and I think it will be just what is needed to make a perfect shot.

My Flickr gallery. All shots I’ve taken with my mother’s digicam. (Best photo size/resolution is to go into a shot, click ‘all sizes’ then choose ‘large’)

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Some good shots there, Sierra Indigo. I especially like Paper Daisies (where do those grow, anyway?) and Heron.

myskepticsight, I bought myself a Nikon D80 as an early Christmas present (I love it, BTW!). I really like Flower, but then I have a thing for photographing flowers (it was really difficult picking just one to post). I also like the composition of The BFFs.

Regarding the spider in Nightmare!, the red background was actually a happy accident. This spider spun its web on my front porch and I thought it would be cool to get it in silhouette. So I framed it in the center of the street light on the corner, and when I played with the brightness and contrast to get my silhouette, the yellow-orange street light became that awesome shade of red. Like I said, a very happy accident. If you want to see what it started as, this is the original, untouched photo.

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I’ve been drooling over the D80 ever since I laid hands on it…wonderful camera! I’ll have to settle for getting more lenses for my D50, I’m still just using the kit.

The Nikon boards on dpreview are a good place to post shots and get tips and stuff. The people there take some unbelievable shots! There are a few good Nikon groups on Flickr, too.

Sierra, I really like your pics too. And your mom’s got a nice camera there.

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Wonderful! The only one I wasn’t as crazy about was the dock. But I don’t know enough about photography to know why. The others all looked like they are from one of those professional art coffee table books.

Loved the drying coffee beans photo the best, neat patterns and capture of life in motion!

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I really liked the Astrological Clock and Ash the Younger. I liked the composition of Wet and Dry and Two Turtles, but it seemed like you pushed the contrast/brightness a little too much and lost some of the details.

I wish I had a digital SLR, but I don’t have that kind of cash to drop. Besides, I still love film and working in the lab, so I use my old Canon AE-1 and mostly black and white film. Here’s some of the stuff of mine that I like:

Over the shoulder

Bow (warning: slightly saucy, but only PG-13)

Ooh, what’s that?

Arcs and Textures

Green Fountain

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Nice photos. I really like the portraits. The cropping in the two shots of your son works. For the Mayan Girl, my first thought was that I didn’t like the cutting off the top of her head, but on second thought I like it. It works very well as a horizontal, and the inclusion of her clothing is well worth the cropping choice you made.

Two Turtles has some exposure/print problems on the top turtle. It’s been years since I’ve been in a darkroom, but this is something that you could manipulate nicely with exposure/burning/dodging and development adjustments (if it were film). I guess the same can be done digitally, but these are problems that should be corrected while you are taking the photo by taking more control on lighting, not in processing.

I love the composition of Drying Coffee, but I’d like to see more detail of the subject facing the camera. He’s just a little too dark. Lightening his face a bit would make it more interesting.

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Those are wonderful - you may enjoy this shot at 6:30a.m. of a hummingbird through our window, it was taken with a D70…See the Hummingbird. Let me know what you think. :slight_smile:

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I love it…what a nice whimsical photo. The only thing I might try to do is crop it a bit to tighten up on the hummingbird and see what difference that might make.
jakeline, I can’t open your second two photos. I really like the fountain…where did you take that? Was it illuminated with green light, did you use a filter, or did you do that later in Photoshop?

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Oh sorry about that. I think you have to be signed into flickr to see a couple of those. Let me try again:

Ooh, what’s that?

Arcs and Textures

About the fountain, it’s by Disneyland and normally, it looks like this. I try not to edit anything I do on film in photoshop (except for basic brightness/contrast stuff), so that is pretty well how the picture shows on the film. I think the reason it looks green here is because I took the picture at night without a flash, so the blue of the water combined with the yellow of the lights and turned it green. It could also be because I was shooting some very expired film (400 ISO fuji provia pushed to 1600).

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Wow, EvilAsh, I’m blown away by how nice those are! I really didn’t expect them to be very good, and they’re excellent!

The only one I didn’t care for was the dock - the lack of contrast in the foreground threw me. I was just a little bit uneasy with your cropping on “Ash the Younger” - maybe a smidge more of his chin would be nice? Those eyes, though; you did a marvelous job of letting his story shine.

myskeptic, love your kitchen table, too

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Hey folks, there’s some pretty good photos here and few that could be improved with some judicious post-processing.

A recurring issue seems to be contrast. Most (all?) photo editing programs include a histogram view, which is a graphic representation of the tonal range of a particular digital image. It’s important to learn how to read a histogram and to adjust an image’s contrast using ‘levels’ or ‘curves’ (a more advanced tool and not included in many consumer level products) accordingly.

For example, while most of myskepticsight’s photos are well-composed and framed, they appear to be tonally flat. This is probably an artifact of de-saturation but you can compensate by boosting the contrast slightly to give the photos more pop. Otherwise, I really like ‘Flower’ and ‘The BFFs’.

EvilAsh, you’ve got some great shots, as well. My favourites are ‘Wet and Dry’, ‘Mayan Girl’, ‘Astrological Clock’ and ‘Ash the Younger’. Your flower shot is pretty and well-composed but it’s a little under-exposed and could be improved with a small levels adjustment. Both of your kid’s shots are well framed and exposed but the elder ashling suffers from motion blur and what feels like an awkward pose.

‘Atitlan Dock’ is the most problematic shot. Such high-contrast lighting conditions can wreak havoc with your camera’s light meter. This is because your camera’s sensor cannot capture such a high-dynamic tonal range, so the meter has to make educated guesses as to what lighting conditions to expose for. In this case, since the dark foreground and mountain silhouette dominate the shot, it chose to expose for the darker areas. As a result, the sky is washed out and over-exposed.

There are 3 ways to compensate for this: 1) Bracket exposures (consult your camera manual) and then choose the best, 2) Bracket exposures and then combine the multiple images in a photo editor (requires a tripod and photoshop skillz) 3) Use a Graduated Neutral Density filter to balance the exposure (costs money and takes time to set up).

jakeline, I love some of your stuff. ‘Over the Shoulder’ is great and has a real nostalgic feeling and ‘Arcs and Textures’ is a nice abstract with a real sense of motion.

Anyway, if anybody’s interested, here’s a link to my Flickr photostream and a set of my most popular shots.

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Thank you, Hodge. I very much agree with your comments. I only wish I could afford Photoshop or could find a good, free photo editor for Mac. Most or all of those photos were just changed to b&w with iPhoto, and the contrast on there is hard to tweak with any precision. I don’t think I bothered much or at all with these beyond the b&w conversion. Luckily I got them printed at a good place and they don’t look as bad on matte paper in a 5x7. Mom has ‘flower’ matted and framed in her office.

And your shots are amazing!

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I love the photo of Aquarium Corner, Hodge. In what city was this taken?

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Wow, Hodge. Just…wow. After looking at your shots, I feel like an unskilled buffoon. I wonder if you would be willing to email me and share with me some of your tips and techniques, especially with regards to lighting?

Again…WOW! :eek:

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Very impressive, Hodge.

A suggestion to all. Picasa (from Google) is a great photo retouch software. It is no Photoshop, for sure but it has very usable straighten, crop and tonal control tools with a histogram (color split) plus several handy filters including a graduated tint that produces the effect of a GND filter. And it is free.

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EvilAsh - the paper daisies and the heron were both taken at Adelaide Zoo, South Australia. I don’t know where paper daisies are native to, I just know that they grow a lot down here, pretty well :slight_smile:

Thanks for the tip about Picasa, Sapo. I didn’t think to consider it, but I’m DLing it now.

You’ve got a beautiful doggy there, Hodge. And some gorgeous photos.

Si-i-i-gh. I need a camera of my own.

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You are very talented. I LOVE most of them. My least favorite is the buttular bird (I’m going to start using that descriptor), but even he isn’t a bad photo…just the least good of the bunch. Thank you for sharing these shots!

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Thanks, everybody! I appreciate the compliments.

@Intelligently Designed: ‘Aquarium Corner’ was taken in Glasgow, Scotland. There’s a tiny little camera shop in that block of buildings that I went to in search of a lens hood for my 28-200mm zoom. Sadly, it’s been discontinued.

I also want to 2nd (3rd?) the recommendation for Picasa. It’s an excellent consumer grade photo editor and manager. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a Mac version, so it doesn’t help myskepticsight.

One alternative is Photoshop Elements. This ‘lite’ version of PS is significantly cheaper but it still contains 80% of the capabilities of the full version. This is what I used before I upgraded to PS and I thought it was very good value for the money.

There’s also the highly touted open-source GIMP. Its feature-set is very impressive and gives PS a good run for its money but I’ve never been able to make sense of its interface. I think my PS habits have become far too ingrained.

Thanks, again. If you have any specific questions, feel free to send me an email or private message. Otherwise, I’ll post back here with some more general comments about light metering and exposure when I have more time. Unfortunately, I’m running late for work right now.

cheers,
Hodge