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Would you critique my photos?

Alright. I just got a Flickr account (like minutes ago) and uploaded some pics. Heopfully this link works.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tarphotography/654798...

Would you tell me your honest opinion - and if the pic is bad tell me what I could do to improve? I took a photography class this past semester and the prof was a really kind hearted guy - almost to the point of not offering any negative criticism, I think he didn't want to discourage students from taking pics.

All images are in original state with the exception of the watermark I put on them for copyright purposes. I beleive "rainbow and bridge" was edited by increasing contrast and maybe brightness from the original and "newborn feet" was also turned into a black and white and brightened up.

I thank you in advance for your opinions!

Update:

I just started getting serious about photography, and have been doing it for about 2 months.

Update 2:

I just started getting serious about photography, and have been doing it for about 2 months.

Update 3:

I am a college sophomore. I usually just practice on flowers / plants becuase they are readily available subjects. Could anyone give me other ideas on readily available - not-so-common subjects? Like, what do you think are interesting things to shoot.

Also, I have tons of other pictures, that are not all flowers, I just took and outdoor photography class, so that's why a lot of them are flowers - many more experienced people in the class recommended shooting flowers to practice lighting/composition/finding creative shots in something normal.

5 Answers

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  • 9 years ago
    Favorite Answer

    Flowers are ok to start on - they're easy beginner subjects because they stay still & you can practice a lot of techniques on them (depth of field & lighting for example).

    I think, given your newness to photography it's a good start. You are looking at things with a different eye to the norm. You have though about the image before you took it - this sort of previsualisation is what sets apart good photography from merely mediocre snapshots.

    You do need to work on exposure - the purple flowers shot, for example - great use of shallow depth of field, but its a tad underexposed & lacking contrast. This can be easily sorted in post, using levels or curves but better to get it right in camera first. About a half a stop more exposure would've helped.

    Ditto the sunflowers - they are lacking in 'punch' - a third to half a stop more exposure might've helped a bit.

    The slow exposure also needs some contrast enhancement. Shooting well stopped down does not give you the best image quality - for daylight long exposures you really need a neutral density filter to avoid having to use small apertures.

    Good to see you shooting in manual modes - you have creative control - now use it to shoot what exposure YOU want, don't always 'zero' the meter - experiment with using under or over exposure where it will improve the image.

    I see you 'centre weight' meter - this is better than matrix metering, but consider trying 'Spot' metering too.

  • Anna
    Lv 4
    9 years ago

    Well, there are loads, so I won't comment on all of them, but they are over all really good, some of them are a bit to plain for me. Sometimes less is more, but sometimes less is less. I understand why the watermark is there but you could try to make it smaller so that it doesn't ruin the picture, because on some of these photos it's completely destroyed the feel of the photo. And next time you take a photography course you could try to get a teacher that is still nice but gives constructive critism, not negative, but constructive. How old are you?

  • 9 years ago

    It's all very amateur'ish if you ask me, photographing flowers is what all the beginner photographers do.

    You have a few lighting problems in a few of the images, especially, the pine tree one, the pine looks very blown out and wayyy to overexposed because you used the flash, when, it would have been better if you didn't.

    Try different types of photography, and dont just limit yourself to one thing.

    My Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/samsmithsphotography/

  • 9 years ago

    I'll talk about: Purple flowers poking out fence

    I like that it isn't just yet another flower photo, it has something unique, something extra.

    The downside is that it is very flat and boring looking. The upside is that this is very easy to fix via curves/levels.

    I like the shallow DOF and the composition.

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  • branum
    Lv 4
    5 years ago

    interesting spin on the selective colouring, yet easily some thing is slightly blah, style of flat looking, in case you've been going for darkish it would were darker if no longer then there ought to be lighter and with extra assessment to it.

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