Critique Absolute beginner trying to improve from point and click

D

DanielP

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Name
Dan
Edit My Images
Yes
Hi All

I am an absolute beginner and am trying to teach myself how to improve my photography, mainly from the internet. I would really appreciate any feedback on this image to help me learn where I need to improve most and where I am on the right track. The photo was taken as a memory of a holiday with my girlfriend but I would really like to improve these from thoughtless snaps to well composed and captured images that I would want to look at again and possibly get printed to hang somehwere in the house.

Camera: Canon 40D
Lens: 18-55mm Kit lens



The things which I do not like about the shot are -
- The exposure on her right arm, I think it is overexposed
- The tree in the background, I wish I had taken this with a faster lens at a lower aperture to blur it slightly more but I dont have one yet.

The thing that I really like about the photo is the contrast between the orange horse and the blue sea, it looks appealing to me and is the main reason I kept it in colour instead of B and W.

Any comments and criticisms will be greatly appreciated, especially as I realise it is a very average photo but we all have to start somewhere!

Dan
 
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Hi Dan,

The shot is a tad overexposed (as you have noticed in the arm). Basically that means the highlights are "blown" (no detail). Therefore try to retain some highlight detail. You can shoot multiple different exposures in manual (bracketing) with the aim of getting one spot on.
The tree growing out of the subject's head is not ideal although you may have been limited in where you could have stood to avoid that.

Perhaps also crop the botton of the pic nearer the horse's chin. The idea is to confine the shot to the main subject, i.e. person and animal - that concentrates the viewers eye on the subject.

You will get better image quality control if you shoot in RAW, but that is another subject.

You have caught the interaction between the young lady and the horse superbly. That matters a lot. Getting the technicalities correct is much easier than developing an eye for a shot (y)
 
Thanks Doug, much appreciated.

The shot was taken in RAW but i think the highlights are still too far gone to recover them. Need to get a lot more practice to notice things like the tree and do something about it before I get back to the computer. Would have struggled moving for this shot though as it was a steep drop to one side and a fence in the way the other.
 
Hi Daniel, that's a pretty nice image for a holiday shot it captures the moment and the important parts are exposed ok and in focus.

But yeah there's definitely some issues. It's overexposed for sure, the hat and the arm are blown out in what you've posted and the arm especially being as bright there pulls away from her face. The downside here is because her face is so shaded with the hat if you'd exposed for those areas you'd have lost the face which is more important. Without seeing what you've done to the raw already it's hard to say for definite if you could have exposed it much differently from that angle to fix it as is. A little fill flash might have been enough to fill the shadows in her face and allow to bring the overall exposure down a wee bit to keep detail in the parts that have blown. Also it's taken on a mega bright day in harsh light so if portrays that feel correctly whilst keeping good detail and colour.

If you were doing this as a posed shot I would have brought her near arm down to go under the fence as it pulls focus and probably tried to get her head up a bit so it was more prominent in the photo but sometimes you just need to capture the moment thats there.

DanielP said:
- The tree in the background, I wish I had taken this with a faster lens at a lower aperture to blur it slightly more but I dont have one yet.
Click to expand...

Framing is the biggest issue that tree out of her head is a definite distraction, in this case a shallower depth of field wouldn't have helped much as you'd still have a big blob growing out of her head. I know the below isn't exactly as it would be but gives the idea...

ForCritique_bokeh%20Small.jpg


You really need to watch for things like this when composing the photo and try to move so they're not in frame or in a less obtrusive location. In this image it's fairly easy to clone out and coupled with an 8x10 crop instead of the out of camera 2x3 gives it a getter look imo...

ForCritique_crop.jpg
 
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Thanks for the feedback Craig, I really appreciate you taking the time to show the examples. "Tree antlers" will definitely be something I make sure to check in compositions going forward. My PP skills are somewhat lacking at the moment but the lady in the photo happens to be a bit of a whiz at it so will get her to teach me how to remove the tree.

Cheers again
Dan
 
Nice edit @CraigDHD , and good explanation of issue to the OP too (and Doug also). I think this is a very nice shot, nice moment captured, unusual subject and location, good colours, sharp focus and the top of the fence leads the eye nicely to the subject.

If you review the whole frame when looking through the viewfinder next time Dan (not just the subject) you'll soon spot things that shouldn't be there and will know to re-compose the shot. One thing to add is to look at the histogram (press the info button when looking at a shot on camera) when reviewing the pic, this will show if you have any blown highlights (if it goes off the right hand side of the chart) or if you are losing shadow detail (if it goes off the left). Another way to check for blown highlights is to change your options/settings so that the blown areas flash when you review the picture on the camera (assuming your camera can do this, that is - pretty sure my old 400D had this facility).

Good luck...I'm looking forward to seeing more of your shots.
 
I'm not proposing it as a substitute to getting it right in camera but there are times it's nearly impossible to get everything out th frame so it's a good skill to have. If you have a version photoshop or elements it's fairly easy. In this image it was very simple I just selected the tree with the rectangle marquee then used the quick select brush whilst holding the "alt" key to remove the hat from the selection. Once the selction was made content aware fill did 90% of the work and then keeping the selection active a clone stamp tool cleaned up the funny extra hat bits photoshop created.

There's an awesome video by aaron nace on removing distractions with photoshop if it's something you want to learn, phlearn do a bunch of great free tutorials on post processing.

 
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DanielP said:
Thanks for the feedback Craig, I really appreciate you taking the time to show the examples. "Tree antlers" will definitely be something I make sure to check in compositions going forward. My PP skills are somewhat lacking at the moment but the lady in the photo happens to be a bit of a whiz at it so will get her to teach me how to remove the tree.

Cheers again
Dan
Click to expand...

Yes, Craig has got the content of the shot just right. Had the highlights been recoverable it would have been a very appealing shot indeed.
 
Thanks all, I am sure there will be many more photos I will ask for your critique on soon! In fact I am taking the camera rock climbing tonight so maye well have some tomorrow if there are any I am remotely happy with.

Can I ask a really beginnery question?
When you do things like removing trees (I understand it would be better to avoid them in the composition but not always possible) in photoshop what does your workflow look like. I am currently using lightroom to catalogue and edit my photos so would I do this as normal, export as something uncompressed (tif?) and then open this in photoshop to remove the tree? or is this backwards?

Cheers Dan
 
If you're using photoshop and lightroom you can just right click on the image and choose edit in photoshop it will then open photoshop and load the image as a tiff, you can save in photoshop when you're finished editing and the new edited file will automatically appear in your lightroom catalogue once the save completes. As to workflow for me it varies image to image, generally do as much as you need to with the raw in lightroom before you export it to photoshop if that's needed.
 
Thanks for all the advice and the link to the tutorial. Managed to get rid of the tree in photoshop and the photo is much improved.



Good to know that if there really is no way to get something out of a composition before taking the photo it is not too hard to do a reasonable job in photoshop if the background is simple.
 
Nice work on the tree removal, but on this occasion I would have altered the framing by a different crop.
The original pictures lacks a primary point of interest, with the lady upper left and the horse lower right.
The tree and the sky are a distraction so I would be tempted to crop down to the top of the ladies shoulder, or a bit lower, losing the top of the hat, and up a bit below the horses chin..
This would have the effect of lifting the horses head up the frame and giving its "expressiion" more impact , while at the same time lessening the effect of the slight over exposure of the arm.
It would be a virtually square crop which would fill the frame with the subject(s) and losing extraneous background.
 
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