Backyard Angel C&C

anm90 · Mar 22, 2010

Wanted to get a few photos to play around with this afternoon and created this one earlier this morning. Unfortunately it was pretty cloudy out and the sun only barely poked through a couple of times so the lighting was pretty flat. What are your thoughts? Shot in raw and edited in ACR and Photoshop.

ISO 200, f/4.2, 1/640 s

Gaerek · Mar 22, 2010

anm90 said:
Wanted to get a few photos to play around with this afternoon and created this one earlier this morning. Unfortunately it was pretty cloudy out and the sun only barely poked through a couple of times so the lighting was pretty flat. What are your thoughts? Shot in raw and edited in ACR and Photoshop.

ISO 200, f/4.2, 1/640 s

Cloudy skies are great for shots like this, at least, better than noontime sun. Clouds are like giant softboxes in the sky. Overcast days are the days I start looking for subjects like this to shoot. The big problem with this shot is that it's overexposed, and I think you have some blown highlights on the statue. I would go back into ACR and move the recovery slider all the way to 100, and maybe try reducing the exposure and increasing contrast.

As far as composition is concerned, part of me likes the simpleness of it, but there's another part of me that would love to see the rest of the statue. I think the latter part is winning. You can get away with chopping pieces of your subject out, but I'm not sure it worked in this case.

BekahAura · Mar 22, 2010

Very nice, I don't mind the cropping of the statue, but I do think there is too much empty space above. I think a square crop would look nicer.

Bekah

anm90 · Mar 26, 2010

Here is another edit of this photo. I took Gaerek's suggestions and played with the recovery slider a bit. Any better?

Also, as far as composition goes, I am not able to keep the angel entirely in frame and have a nice background unfortunately. Need to find something else to put the statue on so I can take a photo from further away and at a high angle so that I can get the entire thing in the photo without getting a distracting background. Not sure how I'll do that... maybe I can fiddle with it tomorrow.