calloway

Actually, you are misinformed.

 

A breakthrough CMOS sensor that produces 3.11 million pixels and a 2:3 aspect ratio"

--http://www.powershot.com/powershot2/d30/index.html

 

The EOS D60 has a CMOS sensor (and a more advanced one at that), but the EOS D30 definitely has one as well.

Is the depth of field too shallow in this photo? Or does the

effect "work"? Any other comments welcome, too.

Good? Bad?

All comments welcome. =)

I had a little fun with this picture by deliberately focussing on the

shoebill stork that was farther from me. I think that it gives the

feeling that the two storks are conversing with each other. Does

it "work"?

What do you think of this picture? I like the effect of the lowered

head and the blurred cage in the background. All opinions

welcome.

I wouldn't say it's that bad, but there's definitely room for improvement. The apparent lack of sharpness bugs me, as does the small splash of magenta in the lower right corner. And I probably wouldn't have framed the picture as tightly on the top and bottom.

 

Anyway, don't forget to always take ratings with a grain of salt, especially when you're questioning a single rating. People have varied tastes; perhaps that rater isn't fond of roses.

No offense, but I find the picture far from "perfect". First, the picture appears to be soft or out of focus. Given your listed shutter speed, I doubt it was due to hand shake, so I'm guessing that the picture was simply not scanned well. Second, the vignetting is severe and uneven. I'm don't know what the cause of the vignetting is (an extender?), but the darkness seems to encroach on the black swallowtail and yet leaves the buttonwillow blossoms untouched, which shifts the attention away from the butterflies. Third, the lack of detail in the black swallowtail is disappointing, but that could also be due to the scan.

 

Some suggestions. If you can't manage a reflector, you may want to try using a fill-flash, or perhaps a flash manually set to a low output. And remember that the DoF when trying to get close to butterflies is really tight. I've done a good deal of trying to photograph butterflies (see this folder for four pictures), so I realize how difficult it can be. But it is crucial that the butterflies are well lit and sharp. If these problems are due to the scanning process, you probably want to work on that. No sense in showing off a bad rendition of what may, in fact, be a perfect picture.

I don't really mind the blobbish moon very much. The aspects of the picture that bug me are the tilted horizon and the lighted object in the lower left that appears to be generating another yellowish stripe. I would crop the picture tighter on the sides and perhaps rotate the picture slightly to try to fix the horizon.

I think you cropped the picture just a bit too tightly. All it needs is a little more space on the left side, moving the komodo dragon's nose away from the edge and showing more of the nicely blurred background.

 

As for the washed out top scales of the dragon... If the detail is there on the original, you definitely should try to bring it out. You may want to consider darkening the whole picture and then dodging the eye to preserve detail there.

 

Regardless, a good picture.

Well, perhaps you have not noticed in other pictures, but photo.net saves uploaded pictures as a much lower quality JPEG than uploaded (undoubtedly to conserve space). The banding in ths sky is probably a result of that. Same with the pixelation, though I might have sharpened the picture too much.

 

Take a look at this picture that I uploaded that shows clearly the severe degradation that can occur in quality of the uploaded picture. All the artifacts around the leaves and in the sky are not present on the original (obivously) and are not present in the JPEG I uploaded.

What do you think of this picture? Is the background too busy? Is

there not enough detail in the stem/stalk? Is the center too washed

out? All comments are welcome.

A while back, I uploaded an older version of this picture, and I got

some pretty bad ratings, but no comments why. So, I cropped the

picture tighter and adjusted the white balance, and here is the final

result. Please leave comments as to why this picture is good or bad.

First, I agree with everything Tim says above, especially the part about the colors. In addition, I wish that the amorphous white blob (tissues? miscellaneous trash?) in the recess below the chair was not there. My eye keeps on returning to it because it interrupts the flow of orange.

I like the heron, but I do not like the log(?) and its reflection in the background. Admittedly, there needs to be something there to appropriately balance the bird, but in this case I feel the log adds too much unwanted tension. The point-like shape is reminiscent of a sword about to stab into the back of the heron's head, thus disrupting the otherwise calm image.

 

Unless, of course, that was your intention...

I took a series of shots of this frog while rotating a polarizer attached to my lens, so the image went from no reflection to all reflection (the body was then barely visible). In the end, I felt that both the reflection and the body were important to the shot. What do you think?

 

Another picture of a frog

Well, first off, the actual shutter speed was recorded automatically when the picture was shot, so assuming that my EOS D30 wasn't lying to me, yes, I shot it at 1/750s. I checked my other shots, and my other shots (several 1/750s shots and a 1/500s shot) also show blurred wings. Though, one shot had wings significantly less blurry than this one; I guess the above shot caught the wings when they were the fastest. As for why you claim not to need as fast shutter speeds to freeze the wings, perhaps this species of hummingbird has a much higher rate of flapping.

I was originally confused by your remark since the photo should have been sharp. After all (as written above), I was at ISO 400 and using a shutter speed of 1/750s on a lens of equivalent focal length of 480mm. Even my jittery hands aren't that bad. So I checked my original image, and I remembered that the image I uploaded was a severe crop (~ 1/5 of the original image), which could account for the lack of sharpness combined with the fact I was trying to manual focus on the hummingbird as it flitted about.

 

Regardless, I did some work on the original image, and uploaded a new crop. This version is even more severely cropped than before, but this time sharpened to bring out the detail on the bird more (on inspection, my original upload was a little too conservatively sharpened). Does it help?

This picture is one of my first attempts at capturing a hummingbird

on (digital) film. Obviously, it would be better if there was not a

shadow over the hummmingbird's head, but how significantly does that

detract from the picture? Comments are welcome.

Actually, I took 50+ pictures spread over two occasions, and only 5 were good enough to keep. But, I agree, Frog 2 and this picture are the best.

Any comments are welcome, especially on depth of field and perhaps

composition.

Er, it might be; I wouldn't know. I took this in Pasadena, CA, and a whole bunch of these birds were up in a tree cawing really loudly.

I like the lighting and the colors. Composition-wise, however, I would have preferred less of the foreground sand so half the picture would not be more or less the same (although interesting).

I really like the curves and lines in this photo. I intentionally

left the leaf in the photo as a contrast in color and shape. Please

comment on the composition.

I like the multitude of spikes fading into darkness towards the

right, but other have thought that the scene is too busy. Comments

are welcome.

I think the top ends of this sculpture produce interesting curves and

shadows. Comments?