Are these boring?

Gazman

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Ok, a couple of my very 1st photos with my new dslr, and in these photos i`m wondering if these photos have any interest in them, im trying to figure out what makes a photo speak to people.


1st couple were from amsterdam, and i couldnt believe how many bikes there were, it was like a religion. So i thought i`d try to capture the feel

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These next 2, were taken a day or 2 after returning home near some tracks behind my house.

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At the moment im not overly concerned with technical details as this is my 1st week getting into photography, but please feel free to give any critique, it all helps :)
 
I wouldn't say they're boring so much as they are.... overused.

They're just very generic, very similar to many other pictures, and not really anything spectacular that makes me say "WOW!" but other than that they're very nice. Keep trying and work on finding more interesting scenes to photograph.
 
I think the tracks (assuming no train is coming) would look really nice taken from ground level. I think it would add more depth to the shot. As for the bikes, the idea of seeing them all in one location is kind of cool, but it doesn't do much for me. I'm sure other opinions will vary of course.
 
Not bad for a first week-er.
I'd say try working in lighting that's a little less harsh (morning and evening).
Also study up on isolating your primary focus.
 
I always feel subject is subjective. I'm just starting out also and I think it's far more difficult to photography something you don't find interesting and make it interesting to someone else. It takes skill to do that, I think. I say shoot what speaks to you and do be concerned about the technicals. Later on the technicals will come natural and you can concern yourself with what is interesting to other.

That's just my thought anyway.
 
Your photos have great potential. I like the interesting angles and shapes you have going on, such as the bikes curving and going off into the distance in the first shot. I think all of them could benefit by as saltface said, isolating your primary focus. They're just a bit too busy for me, with people, buildings, signs, and other things in the background that detract from the primary focus. I would play around with depth of field here to isolate your main subject.
 
Yea, i agree entirely about the photos of the bikes, i almost didnt put them on because i felt they were far too "busy" , nothing really to capture the attention.
These were all shot in landscape mode.

it was my 1st day with my camera, and i was wallking around the city with my wife, so there was no chance of me messing around with manual settings, when i had no clue, and an impatient wife :)

Thanks for comments so far, reading and learning.
 
I agree with the busy-ness that most of these photos show. I know it's the bikes you wanted to show off but when there's that many of them you dn't really need to show them all in focus, letting the background blur to get rid of unwanted items might blur some of the bikes but you'd still understand what you're looking at.

I gotta say though, that last one of the tracks with grass caught my attention. I like the focus you got here, the colors nice and the highlights look like the reached a good limit. The dew adds that something extra too. I like this one.
 
the ones with the bikes... there is too much going on in the pictures to give any interest in one thing. you need to isolate the subject by either using a large aperture opening to give a shallow DOF or, look for a location that doesn't have all the other stuff in the background. You say that there were bikes everywhere but taking a picture of 1/2 to a dozen bikes does not convey that image. You'd have to find a spot that had hundreds of bikes to portray that.
 
I understand that you meant to capture for yourself (and hopefully also others) to see (and feel a little) how MANY bicycles there were out and about in Amsterdam. That intention given, I think your middle photo out of the three conveys that idea best. Light is not as bright and harsh as in the third, and the background is not a "bleh!" as in the first. Plus the red "cat eye" lights on the back of each bike give that photo a certain extra. Would you consider cropping that one into a vertical frame to lose all the other elements like the parking sign and the scaffolding and the man on his bike, to ONLY show bicycles parked one after the other on that bridge?

The first rail photo is a nice example for a vanishing point, and I am a sucker for vanishing points! But I don't like where you placed the horizon, I feel there is more sky there than needs to be. You can test out different means of cropping that one and find out for yourself which one FEELS best to you in the end. Test this way of cropping and that and all different ways and begin to feel how the photo as such feels differently.

In the last I see there was a patch of grass with a lot of dew, but you focused on the patch in front with only little dew. This creates a kind of longing inside of me to see the part further back in focus much rather than the foreground... :scratch:
 
Lafoto, i actually did like you said originally, but then i wasnt sure if i was going to even post the bike shots , so i didnt save the changes i made :(
It did make a difference i think, but as my eye is not the best yet, i didnt think it would make enough of a difference. Live and learn i guess :)

Also agree with comment about last one, unfortunately this shot was a little rushed, my little girl was playing up and we were just walking home when i spotted them.

i just whipped my camera out layed down and clicked, i will definately head back and play around more.

Thanks for comments.
 
Some good comments here... I think you are doing great on your first week. I can see you are crouching down on the first one to get to the level of the bikes, which is great. One thing I read somewhere that stuck with me is "someone should not be able to tell how tall you are by looking at your photos".

Anyway, I think you are on the right track. Just keep experimenting, and also try to analyze other peoples photos to figure out what makes them good or bad, I think doing that has helped me a lot.
 

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