I'd like your critique of my photos

[Chaotic42]

Hey all.

I entered the world of DSLR last month with the help of the forum. I picked up a Nikon D80 and since then I've been going out and taking a few pictures. I'd like to hear your thoughts and comments on them. What do you like, what do you dislike, what would you have done differently, etc.

Right now I only have a 28-80mm and a 70-300mm lens. They seem to fit just about every situation across which I may come. I do have a 50mm f/1.8 lens on the way, but the seller has been kind of slow in shipping it.

Anyway, here is my website. The DSLR starts in August of 2008, but I have other pics as well if you're inclined. Like I said, I'd love to hear any thoughts which you may have. My subject matter is somewhat limited because I basically live in a swamp.

Thanks!

 

[Hyperlite]

great pictures! looks like your taking nicely to the D80. I had one nagging thought while looking through them, and that is that colors seemed a bit... drab in several instances. The desert pictures in particular, they felt just a tad bit dark. And just out of curiosity, in the album "Around Town", at the bottom of the first page, what was the comparison going on there between the two middle bottom pictures? the on is way overexposed, as i'm sure you noticed, because the one next to it is perfectly normal.

i loved all the macro pictures...but i think all macro pictures benefit from a slight bump in saturation.

the picture of the NASA sign... IQ was fantastic, but the white portions of the sign got a little washed out.

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: Hyperlite
great pictures! looks like your taking nicely to the D80. I had one nagging thought while looking through them, and that is that colors seemed a bit... drab in several instances. The desert pictures in particular, they felt just a tad bit dark. And just out of curiosity, in the album "Around Town", at the bottom of the first page, what was the comparison going on there between the two middle bottom pictures? the on is way overexposed, as i'm sure you noticed, because the one next to it is perfectly normal.

The overexposed pic is 40mm f/22 @ .77s while the normal looking pic is 52mm f/11 @ .07s

i loved all the macro pictures...but i think all macro pictures benefit from a slight bump in saturation.

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. I've just been running "Levels" in Photoshop 7 on most of these. I've done very little processing on them. I'm waiting to pickup CS4 when it comes out.

the picture of the NASA sign... IQ was fantastic, but the white portions of the sign got a little washed out.

I was surprised at how clean that sign is. They must have recently replaced it. It looks a little better in the unprocessed pic, but it's still kind of washed out. Should I have lowered the shutter speed and then bumped up the brightness on this one?

Thanks for looking them over.

 

[Hyperlite]

Originally posted by: Chaotic42

Originally posted by: Hyperlite
great pictures! looks like your taking nicely to the D80. I had one nagging thought while looking through them, and that is that colors seemed a bit... drab in several instances. The desert pictures in particular, they felt just a tad bit dark. And just out of curiosity, in the album "Around Town", at the bottom of the first page, what was the comparison going on there between the two middle bottom pictures? the on is way overexposed, as i'm sure you noticed, because the one next to it is perfectly normal.

The overexposed pic is 40mm f/22 @ .77s while the normal looking pic is 52mm f/11 @ .07s

i loved all the macro pictures...but i think all macro pictures benefit from a slight bump in saturation.

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. I've just been running "Levels" in Photoshop 7 on most of these. I've done very little processing on them. I'm waiting to pickup CS4 when it comes out.

the picture of the NASA sign... IQ was fantastic, but the white portions of the sign got a little washed out.

I was surprised at how clean that sign is. They must have recently replaced it. It looks a little better in the unprocessed pic, but it's still kind of washed out. Should I have lowered the shutter speed and then bumped up the brightness on this one?

Thanks for looking them over.

yeah my pleasure, there are lots of great pictures in there. yeah try dropping the shutter speed just a bit...

seriously though, for only having the camera for a month i think those are some pretty nice pictures.

 

[Flipped Gazelle]

Some of those shots are really very good, and they weren't even taken with your new DSLR.

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: Flipped Gazelle
Some of those shots are really very good, and they weren't even taken with your new DSLR.

Thanks!

I'd love to go back to California with my new camera. I took ~1400 pics on that trip, but a lot of them didn't come out because of blur. I was with a coworker on the trip and if I hadn't been, there would have been 20,000 pictures.

 

[OdiN]

Well honestly...they weren't bad snapshots.

You need to work a lot on composition and exposure. The colors are somewhat bland in a lot. Most of them I was looking at and asking why you took the photo - what is it you saw that you wanted to capture?

One of the keys to landscape pictures is "Foreground, Middleground, Background" - you should have some interest in all areas. Remember it's just a good guideline though.

I'll try to comment on a few images.

http://www.bigplasticfork.org/chaotic42/Yard/028.JPG

Good concept - water drops on leaves - certainly can be interesting. In this case - this composition isn't. Exposure is good. Focus is off - I can't find anything sharp in the entire image. Was the wind blowing perhaps?

What I would have done here was get a macro lens and fill up the whole frame with a few water drops and see what that looks like. See if you can get any interesting reflections in the water drops of something else in the area.

Most of the shots in the "My Yard" album I am not really sure why you took them. Trees and sky...one with a street light in the middle of it. Bushes, grass....

The red leaf has interest. The flower (http://www.bigplasticfork.org/chaotic42/Yard/019.JPG) is interesting, but nothing is really in good focus, the flower is centered right in the frame. It's the interest in the shot and should take up most of the frame itself as the surroundings aren't that interesting.

There are some decent cloud shots in the Around Town gallery.

http://www.bigplasticfork.org/...c42/AroundTown/026.JPG

Why did you take that picture?

Gulf Coast - Ahh! There is some potential here.

http://www.bigplasticfork.org/...ic42/GulfCoast/019.jpg

Decent shot - I would have looked for better framing. Sky is blown out. Biggest problem? You used f/3.5 to take this picture and you have some of the dock in focus and everything else is way out of focus. Could have been an interesting vertical shot here. I don't think I've seen any verticals - turn your camera, look at things in a different way



Anyway - overall I am just not seeing the reason for most of these pictures. If you're just taking snapshots to remember a place by - okay. But if you want to do more with photography I think you need to work a lot on composition.

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: OdiN
Gulf Coast - Ahh! There is some potential here.

http://www.bigplasticfork.org/...ic42/GulfCoast/019.jpg

Decent shot - I would have looked for better framing. Sky is blown out. Biggest problem? You used f/3.5 to take this picture and you have some of the dock in focus and everything else is way out of focus. Could have been an interesting vertical shot here. I don't think I've seen any verticals - turn your camera, look at things in a different way

Yeah, I haven't done any vertical shots. I might do some this weekend. The weather is too nice not to go out. The shot above is one that I was really disappointed in. Would you have used something like f/11 and a much longer exposure?

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

I would have to agree with Odin on a lot of the shots. Why you decided to take pictures of what you did confused me a bit. I didn't really find them interesting.

One thing that you want to try to do is shoot during the time when the light is the most dramatic, usually at dawn and in the evenings, such as an hour before and after the sunrise and sunset. The diagonal light will really bring some nice colors and depth to your pictures. You seem to be taking a lot of shots in the middle of the day, which explains why a lot of them look washed out. I actually do my recon during the middle of the day, and come back to places I've scoped out in the morning or evenings to photograph them.

I also noticed that you kinda had a panorama going in the Joshua Tree gallery. Not sure how to stitch it together? Autopano is a great tool for this.

 

[dmw16]

I am only getting started, but I have been reading a lot of articles online about the rules of composition. Some of the images I looked at seem like they'd benefit from reading some articles on those "rules". Take the rule of thirds for example. You centered a lot of your subjects rather than placing them at an intersection point.

Also, the focus seemed off on some shots that I think were otherwise great.

Like I said, I am just getting started so take my comments with a grain of salt.

 

[OdiN]

Originally posted by: Chaotic42

Originally posted by: OdiN
Gulf Coast - Ahh! There is some potential here.

http://www.bigplasticfork.org/...ic42/GulfCoast/019.jpg

Decent shot - I would have looked for better framing. Sky is blown out. Biggest problem? You used f/3.5 to take this picture and you have some of the dock in focus and everything else is way out of focus. Could have been an interesting vertical shot here. I don't think I've seen any verticals - turn your camera, look at things in a different way

Yeah, I haven't done any vertical shots. I might do some this weekend. The weather is too nice not to go out. The shot above is one that I was really disappointed in. Would you have used something like f/11 and a much longer exposure?

Depends on your camera. I use f/13-f/16 or so for landscapes.

Longer exposure would be necessary to get enough light at the smaller apertures. You want to keep ISO at 100/200 as you don't want noise at all creeping in.

Also use a tripod.

 

[dblevitan]

Regarding exposure, it really depends on the scene. You can create great landscapes at f/4.5, but it all depends on what you're shooting. As for a tripod, you don't need it if you pay attention to exposure and (especially) have VR/IS. It helps, but carrying a heavy laptop into the field is a pain in the neck that's not usually worth it.

When you present photographs on a website, you only want to present the best. Out of the roughly 8k photographs I've taken with my camera, I only present about 60 on my website, plus about another 200 that are from trips (but are generally lower quality/not as interesting). One of the hard parts of having a web gallery is figuring out which photographs to present.

 

[Jawo]

Originally posted by: dblevitan
Regarding exposure, it really depends on the scene. You can create great landscapes at f/4.5, but it all depends on what you're shooting. As for a tripod, you don't need it if you pay attention to exposure and (especially) have VR/IS. It helps, but carrying a heavy laptop into the field is a pain in the neck that's not usually worth it.

When you present photographs on a website, you only want to present the best. Out of the roughly 8k photographs I've taken with my camera, I only present about 60 on my website, plus about another 200 that are from trips (but are generally lower quality/not as interesting). One of the hard parts of having a web gallery is figuring out which photographs to present.

How do you (or anyone) determine what to post? I go through and try to pick the best pictures, but also other random pictures of the culture and surroundings. Additionally there are the fellow travelers who want to see all the pictures I took (since they assume I'm a pro with an XTi). Therefore I try to post a story, per se. For example, when I was posting pictures from Peru I posted some the best shots of the mountains, but also random pictures of the food, the US corporate presence, and friends.

How do you deal with this?

 

[OdiN]

Originally posted by: Jawo

Originally posted by: dblevitan
Regarding exposure, it really depends on the scene. You can create great landscapes at f/4.5, but it all depends on what you're shooting. As for a tripod, you don't need it if you pay attention to exposure and (especially) have VR/IS. It helps, but carrying a heavy laptop into the field is a pain in the neck that's not usually worth it.

When you present photographs on a website, you only want to present the best. Out of the roughly 8k photographs I've taken with my camera, I only present about 60 on my website, plus about another 200 that are from trips (but are generally lower quality/not as interesting). One of the hard parts of having a web gallery is figuring out which photographs to present.

How do you (or anyone) determine what to post? I go through and try to pick the best pictures, but also other random pictures of the culture and surroundings. Additionally there are the fellow travelers who want to see all the pictures I took (since they assume I'm a pro with an XTi). Therefore I try to post a story, per se. For example, when I was posting pictures from Peru I posted some the best shots of the mountains, but also random pictures of the food, the US corporate presence, and friends.

How do you deal with this?

Anything I'm putting in a gallery is most likely shot with the intention of being shown in a gallery. So I'm trying to get a good shot.

Snapshots of trips and stuff....I don't really take many if any at all. But if I do they are seperate and just sent to those interested in them.