todd_west

Fun! Crop is too tight and I'd tilt the camera a bit to the right so the slot in the wall has some angle to oppose the turn of the fitting. You could exploit being off the fitting's center axis more than you are.

Mmm... the usual advice. ;~) Frame lower to get all of the reflection. Frame a little farther to the left to emphasize the fall's shape. This might take moving the camera up and right; it's been a year since I was there, but I think such placement is possible. If not, it should be possible to get much the same thing using movements on the 8x10.

Either center or go slightly more off center. Me, I'd crop the dark bits at left.

I think you need a reflector for fill light. I'd also crop at left for 1:1.25, raise the camera slightly, and rotate a little counter clockwise (but not enough that what Bob thinks is the horizon would be level) rather than leaving it level.

Dang, too bad you didn't have a grad handy! This would be a truly remarkable shot if there was a little more foreground detail.

Jaw dropping shot! I don't think the fill flash adds anything except distraction in the background. I think it would be a stronger photo with just the fire pattern alone. I'd also crop to square, which would also helpfully take out the blue whatever it is on the right hand side.

Unusually nice pose on the squirrel. A bit more depth of field to bring in some of the background canyon would be good. This is also, for all intents and purposes, a portrait, so the usual observations about reflectors apply.

Nice! I wish the depth of field covered her index through ring fingers and the camera was just a little farther out from the rail.

 

Agree about the spots.

The candidness and the contrast between Bobyy and the jester are wonderful. I think you pushed it a little too far in PhotoShop, though. I find the contrast high enough to be a little jarring.

 

Hmm... my standard advice seems to apply here as well. While the masonry dramatically reveals the perspective, this isn't a photograph about perspective the way the Holyroodhouse photo is. What its about is an intimate moment between child and entertainer, and lowering and leveling the camera would minimize the distraction of perspective. Likewise, stepping a foot, or maybe two, to your right and then turning the camera to the left would balance up the composition and make Bobby and the Jester more a pair of equals. With Bobby on the far right, the Jester being so intent on talking to him, and the recession of masonry to the right on top of it, the photo slides a little to the right and makes it feel like Bobby's having a hard time standing is ground.

 

It probably would have been too distracting to move in close at the time, but a tight crop on just the two subjects looks like it would also be a good way of accomplishing this.

Wow... you've just inspired me to go over to the local rose garden at night. Well, once the roses start blooming in the spring, anyway.

This is great! Definitely the best in the set, and one of the better photos you have on photo.net.

 

I like your eye, and the somewhat edgy, avant-garde feel common in your photos. Keep up the good work.

Good, but not perfect. As Randy pointed out, it's a little over exposed. I wouldn't crop the left side arches entirely, but adding to the leftmost half arch would probably be good. It would also be nice to terminate the right side on an open arch. In short, go more to the left.

 

I'd also lower the camera to make the intersection of line and frame on the right side more symmetrical.

 

A polarizer would probably help cut the glare off the left side windows.

 

Hmm... I seem to be repeating my comments on Rust and Autumn Sun IV.

James,

While night exposures are something of a technical challenge, good night photographs aren't very different from good daytime photographs. Find an interesting subject, emphasize the subject, eliminate distractions, etc. Well exposed night photographs always look kinda cool because they're unusual, but this is pretty much a random collection of stuff with nothing that really seems engaging.

Great shot! The framing is really right on---how much cropping did you do?

 

I disagree with Michael. I like the soft colors and contrast.

Wow! This is about as perfect as photographs get. A cut above the rest of your work.

 

I second Ken's comments.

Been looking at Bierstadt, no? I like this composition much better than the frame filling version. Could you have gone with a slightly wider field of view? The trees at the edges are cut off, and the sliver of foreground shadow is distracting. Seems like showing more of it would likely do a nice job of balancing the cliffs.

Tricky to balance exposure across the frame. I don't think you used a grad here, but it looks like one would have helped a lot.

Brian—I've taken a lot of fall color maple shots, it is possible to do better technically, but getting good photographs is surprisingly hard.

Scott—I think this is a good, attention grabbing photo, but it's really too bad the leaves in the lower half of the picture aren't backlit. Also, the branches don't really do anything of thier own, though the do make for a nice black to reference the leaves against. The color on the dwarf maple outside my house was spectacular this fall. I took a lot of internal tree portraits like this one and none of them were really compelling because the branches weren't interesting in their own right. What did work for me was to go a lot longer and work with just a few leaves and maybe a single branch. It's just a thought, but give your 100-300 a whirl next fall.

Let me join the chorus here: In The Sun is the better of the two.

My sense here is that you'd set up to photograph the dogwood's reflection and the ducks came into the frame. It's good photographic instinct to go for a grab shot when these sorts of things happen (particularly with digital, since there's really nothing to lose) and the result here is an interesting and attractive photograph. It falls for me in that the subject is pretty clearly the dogwood's reflection and thus the ducks are more a major distraction than a compelling addition to the photo. I'm not sure if it would be better or worse if the ducks were really in the depth of field in their present location, but there's potentially a great photograph here if you'd waited for the ducks to come farther forward (and the ducks had cooperated). My guess is that they weren't moving fast enough for much of the dogwood reflection to have been preserved, but one never knows.

One of the best compositions I've seen in this genre. Wish I had a staircase like this one handy. Be interesting to see what the shot would look like if a little more of the staircase could be seen at the top and the left (though this would probably require some very tricky tripod work) and was cropped a bit at the right.

I find the yellow cast unappealing—at a minimum, color compensation on the digital version would be good. This strikes me as one of the rare shots that would work better in black and white—I'd try it straight (and maybe with yellow and red filters to see if you can get very strong contrast).