Teach me something - C&C please

f3nr15 wrote:

About me- 37 years old, in Australia. Two fantastic kids aged 6 and 3 who are my reason. Meant to be studying for my specialist exams as a doctor but I've got an artistic itch that needs to be scratched. So I'm taking up photography as an exercise in procrastination

Photog background - in my penultimate year of high-school, I did a six month subject in photography (1992). We built a dark-room, and learned to use a film SLR camera - but I never got it. My photos were always crap, such that I had to steal a friend's photos for my final assessment. It left a bad taste in my mouth so that I've only ever used point-and-shoot since, and haven't actually owned a camera personally. My wife purchased a 1000D 3 years ago to take photos of the kids, and we've had it in auto mode the whole time. As part of my current "procrastination", I've bought a Tamron 17-50mm F2.8 non-VC lens late last year, and turned the dial on the 1000D to M. Oh. My. God. I think I'm hooked. Treated myself to a cheap second hand 650D body on eBay last month.

This thread - I'd like to post some photos that I've taken to learn from your amazing collective knowledge and skill. I don't have many occasions to shoot, but that's even more reason for me to learn enough to get it right more often. I'll only post one photo or one set at a time. I'll try to keep them all in one thread as a record of my progress and your advice.

Apologies in advance - I love taking photos of my kids. I love having a go at post-processing in iPhoto (yikes!), but I've also just downloaded Elements. I love cropping pics into widescreen format (sorry). I love chopping off bits of things in the photos because I think it makes you wonder about the whole (double sorry).

First photo - took this last week. It was a very overcast day, and my daughter was playing at the bottom of a war memorial as a storm was blowing in. I had the WB set to cloudy, but the image was too brown, so I faded it slightly in iPhoto to separate the grey of the stones from my daughter's skin tone and her shirt.

My wife LOVES the photo. I know what I don't like about it, but I'd like to get your feedback.

A Storm Coming

I hope you don't mind, I brought this photo into my computer and did some work to it.

I'll post what I did after I comment. At your request, I'll remove the reworked photo.

The things I don't like:

The hand being clipped, the stick by her foot, the distortion from being to close to your subject thus making the closest parts (hand and arm) look larger than normal, and the background upper left.

What I like:

The framing of the foreground, the fact that I can't see all of her face, the hair moving in the breeze.

What I think you could have done:

If you could have moved back and zoomed out, dropped it down to f2.8, your subject would be in better proportion, while still being framed by the foreground.

I took a crack at this, I hope that's ok.

I felt that it wasn't telling the story of the up coming storm. I thought that the colors were a bit drab, so I got rid of them. I said before I didn't like the stick, so I got rid of it.

I felt that her hair and what she's doing was the story, so that's what I tried to bring out. I lightened her face slightly so you can see that she working hard at what's she's doing. I may have over sharpened the foreground a bit, but I kind of liked it so I left it. In turning it into a black and white, I feel that the upper left corner isn't all that bad now.

Let me know what you think.