LarenzoAOG said:
I'm going to try a shot by shot critique. Fair warning I'm a little out of practice on this.
I think I've said my piece on this shot. It does look like the camera was tilted by a couple of degrees, but I'm guessing that was the trees, not your shot.
Sky shots can be really tricky. There isn't much here to recommend it. In the future I'd avoid taking shots of regular cloud banks, like the upper half of the shot in favor of the alto cumulus (I think), in the lower half. Balancing a shot half and half like this can be really tricky.
You need to close down the F-Stop a little here, and get the whole log in focus. OR, if you want you need to move the depth of field back about six to eight inches so what pops into focus is the decayed portion of the shot. As it is, the viewer's focus is libel to shift towards the torn out piece of log which is out of focus.
You did cut off the top of the subject a little, and that's something in general you want to avoid. Also I'm not certain that this wouldn't have been better suited with a vertical frame, but that's more of a mater of taste than any actual technical critique.
Other than that, quite good.
This is another shot that could do with a deeper depth of field, again, one F-Stop setting should do it. You cut off the right side of the leaf branch, but other than that there isn't much technically wrong that stands out.
Now, there is one serious compositional issue: Because the red and yellow leaves in the background are either as vibrant or more than the subject, the actual outline of what you're shooting is slightly disrupted. I'd be tempted to play with a wide angle lens here, just to see if I could get a clean depth of field over the subject, while keeping the background out of focus. In general though, just keep in mind what is behind what you're shooting whenever you're framing a shot.
I've already written a bit about this, but to recap, this would be better combined with one of the next two shots, in a vertical frame, and probably better (for color composition) if it was shot an hour or two later in the afternoon. (Though, honestly, even just thirty minutes would improve the color quite a bit.)
That said, this shot probably needs some cropping, the bank in the lower right hand corner intrudes into the composition without adding anything, and there's a couple trees along the edge that could depart the shot without much loss.
The bit in the lower right hand corner is kinda a permanent issue in photography, because (unlike an artist) you don't have full control over the environment, you always need to be mindful of what is around the edges of your frame. You don't want to have any aspect of the subject out of frame, but at the same time you don't want anything from outside the frame sneaking in on the edges (usually). What this means practically is, some days you're going to need to be really creative with a camera to get the shot you actually want.
My initial response was to say this was the best companion to 5. That this should have been the bottom half of the image, but, in retrospect, I'm not completely convinced.
On a second pass, this is a much better compliment to 5. I'd crop the top half inch or so, to remove the tree trunks from the shore line, but what you have here is actually a very good frame around a subject. I took you to task for it in 5, but, here it works, creating a bottom border around the subject.
What you did right here was to get a very clean silhouette of the shore against the reflection. Which effectively balances out the shore along the top of the shot. In contrast, the shoreline in 5 is murky, and only marginally visible, so it becomes (rather counterintuitively) more intrusive, while this becomes an element of the shot.
This is actually a pretty good shot. There's maybe a compositional argument to be had about the left side being mostly empty, but with the plant visible on the right side, it works.
The only problem I'm really seeing here is a very minor depth of field issue. You need a little more. Though ultimately this just takes practice.
Another case where you need more depth of field, and the shot cuts off pieces of the subject.
Without knowing conditions of the day, I'm going to say this shot may have been flat out impossible to get perfect though. Even with a wide angle lens, you probably needed a very low F-Stop combined with a long exposure. In that situation any tree movement could foul the shot.
This is a very tricky shot to get the way you want it, versus the way you need it. The bars (at least, that's what they appear to be), need to be in focus enough to be easily identifiable, while still keeping the flower in focus. In this case, my recommendation would be to actually ditch the macro shot, move a foot or two away, get a different angle, and make the shot about flowers poking through the bars, rather than about a flower.
As a quick warning, when you have a shot like this, with parallel objects you do not want to use a wide angle or telephoto lens. They produce a slight distortion at the edges. In nature shots this is basically undetectable, but in shots with straight lines this can be very visible (depending on conditions.)
Also, serious architectural shooting actually requires a box camera, because of the lens distortion that occurs with any 35mm camera (including one with a 50mm lens).
This shot probably needed to be a portrait. Other than that it's fine. A deeper depth of field would be nice, but because of the way it's set up it works as is. You might also want to consider removing the black twig that sticks in from the left, as it is a distracting element. Though, I doubt I would have caught that at the time either.
Basically one of two things needed to be done here. Either the shot needed to be taken from a couple feet further away (or using a wide angle lens), so you'd get all three leaves in shot, or you needed to switch it to a landscape and focus on the middle leaf. As it is, all three leaves are cut off, so either make the shot about one leaf or all three. And again, you almost never want to cut something off at the edge of the frame.
Okay, this is seriously one of the better shots here, aside from one minor technical issue. You did cut off the bottom of one of the leaves. I'm guessing you were paying more attention to where the center of the shot was, as opposed to where the edges of the subject are. Remember when setting up a shot, you want to target the geographic center of your subject, not the literal center (in this case the stem) when there's a discrepancy.
There might be a depth of field issue, but honestly with how vibrant the plant is versus the background, and how minor the dof issue appears to be, you won't see this as a serious issue unless you intend to blow this up to more than 8.5"x11".
Remember you can use composition to distract from technical issues.
Also, as a design issue, red and green are what are called complementary colors, so pairing them off usually works very well, and it does here. (The other additive pairs are Blue/Orange, and Yellow/Purple in case you're wondering.) (By the way, the blue/orange dynamic is part of why I keep saying that 5, 6 and 7 need to be shot later in the day. You can contrast that deeper orange with blues.)
There's a hint of a depth of field issue here here, but that probably means the camera wasn't quite properly focused. Other than that, the out of focus sticks in the background are contrasting enough to give the shot some nice balance. Good work.
Now, on the focus issue, I kinda have to ask, do you have a manual focus camera? If the answer is no, then like F-Stop and Speed, you really need that. If you have a camera that defaults to auto-focus but can be overridden, you really need to override the auto-focus and manipulate that yourself. Along with framing, focus control is the single most important tool that the photographer has.
You need the entire berry cluster to be in focus unless the entire point of the shot is to highlight the decaying berries. If that is your intent, I'd recommend shooting down the branch away from the plant, so that the rotting ones are foremost in the shot.
As an addendum to that, don't be afraid to shoot down a branch away from the core of a plant, or in line with some other object. So long as you don't over use it, it can make for some very interesting shots.
There's some really neat artistic content in the out of focus background, unfortunately the plant itself is in and out of focus as well.
I'd say longer exposure, tighter F-Stop, but I actually worry about losing the circular pattern in the background, which is a very nice touch. Sorry I can't be more informative with this shot.
I'm sorry to say, but this shot just isn't there. The greens (in the background) are two yellow, the reds to orange, and the browns conspire to muddle the whole thing. There are certainly ways to shoot this. Probably much closer to the ground. I might even consider shooting this by getting the camera underneath the plant and shooting upwards.
Shooting this in black and white would have also been a great idea, as there is fantastic texture. And really, aside from the color, there doesn't seem to be any serious issues either technical or compositional with this shot.
I apologize if I've been too harsh or erratic, and most of this is just my initial gut responses to these photos, but I hope it helps you in future shots.
almost makes me want to display my own!
