Bearded Dragon shots

snappygran · Mar 17, 2009

I took these photos at a recent bbq, we found the dragon catching sun in a bush.
Honest criticism would be very helpful! I love them both and hope they are better composed than my dolphin ones! I only have a small Cannon IXUS 8015 camera at the moment, it's new to me so I am still learning to drive it!
snappygran

Chairman7w · Mar 17, 2009

Wow! Cool beans!

Big Mike · Mar 17, 2009

Very nice...and look at the nice dark color to him.

Dwig · Mar 17, 2009

Personally, I think a little cropping to improve the balance of the images is in order. The first shot has too much extremely out of focus foreground and the second places the subject's eye dead center (almost always a bad thing) and has an excessively large waste area at the top.

These are my crop suggestions:

snappygran · Mar 18, 2009

Thanks everyone.....I guess I need to learn a lot more about cropping my photos and placing the subjects in the right place!! I will work on that, thanks....your comments are a great help! Thanks Dwig for your effort with my photos, they look so much better!
snappygran

LaFoto · Mar 18, 2009

It was out there as a WILD animal? Not belonging to anyone living in their terrarium? That would be the ONLY place I'd expect bearded dragons to be, but then I'm not where you are...

These are nice, and I somehow like how through the blurred foreground plants we all get to see how he hid there. Only is it quite centrally composed (his head is smack in the middle of your photo), so if you'd only taken ONE further step to your left and THEN taken the photo, he'd be more over to the right of the frame had have room inside the frame to look into.

And in the second, closer one, I pity the fact that you clipped of part of his beard

... would have been nice to have all of it inside the picture.

snappygran · Mar 22, 2009

Yes, it was out in the wild, sunning in a bush! We have lots of them where I live, central NSW in Australia. This guy had a mate with him as well, but it was a bit shy and not a good subject.
I also love the effect of looking thru the blurred flowers to the dragon, that's one of the things that drew me to it.
Thanks for your views, I was so overcome with excitement at having such a willing model, I never even thought of positioning!!! I guess these are the things I will have to learn...
I am loving reading the posts here and learn something new each time I visit!
I am especially interested in macro shots, more coming soon.
Thanks everyone!