A Few Horse Photos - Critiques Appreciated

[FotoPony]

I'm curious on any critique anyone has to offer of a few of my photos. Just some simple horses taken yesterday, thought they were pretty neat out of the hundreds I got.

Sorry if this isn't the correct way to add photos. I tried to do it through Photobucket but they came out too large.

 

[OrionsByte]

The first thing I noticed is that all of your subjects are centered. For instance, in that first shot, the horse's head basically divides the frame in two, and while his body fills the right half, the left half is basically dead space. Do a Google search for "rule of thirds" and contrast that with your shots.

The other suggestion I would have for you is to pull back a bit; don't zoom in so close. Generally speaking, you want to try to isolate your subject from the background; this is usually done through depth-of-field or lighting. Since you're shooting outside, you can't really control the lighting (without getting in to a discussion about off camera flash and modifiers), and with your particular camera you can't really control depth-of-field that much. That means that isolating the subject from the background will be tough, and that means it can be distracting. One way to minimize the distraction effect is to allow it to show context, and that means zooming OUT instead of zooming IN.

Hope that makes sense!

 

[FotoPony]

Thanks! I'm reading on the rule of thirds now. Honestly, I've heard of offsetting the imagine, but never of the rule of thirds (goes to show I have a lot to learn...). Certainly something I need to learn about.

Now that you said what you did I realized something. Going through all my photos yesterday, very few of them are zoomed out. Most are zoomed in, missing feet or ears, and the subject is dead center. Oops!

The photo I did zoom out on is still dead center.

And in my eyes there is a lot going on in the background. I think I was zooming in so much because it drowns the background out and just makes the picture SUBJECT.

Thank you for your very helpful critique!

 

[OrionsByte]

Yeah our "default" human eyes are a really unhelpful photography tool, because throughout our lives we learn how to disregard the background and focus on whatever we're looking at. Cameras aren't nearly so sophisticated. One of the first things you need to learn is how to look IN TO the viewfinder instead of looking THROUGH the viewfinder; in other words, you have to un-learn that ability to disregard the background so you can really SEE what your camera sees - background and all.