Equine Shoot Favourites C&C

[jazzitupphotography]

Here are a few of my favourites of my first real photoshoot. I would love some feedback on how to improve.
I was having some trouble with shadows because the sun was so bright, and sometimes the sun would hide behind a cloud for a while, so my shutterspeed and apperture varried a lot. I was using my 55-250mm 4-5.6 IS. I was aiming for bright emotional shots.

I like this one a lot because it is different and I love how the girl's eyes look.

 

[paulk_68]

They all look great.

It would be much easier to comment on them if they were numbered.

I would clone out the fence post that looks like it is growing out of the woman's head in the second picture and the same with the picture of the little girl who is sitting down on the ground.

 

[Bitter Jeweler]

#4 and #6 are my faves of the bunch.
Most are washed out, or "blown".

Your focus/sharpness looks good.
On #6, Clone out that fence post, as suggested, and it is a win. It falls nicely into the Rule of Thirds, and has a nice contemplative emotional quality. :thumbup:

#4 is nice, it has the best exposure of the bunch, I think.

The last image, the kids are looking different ways, which is distracting to the viewer.

(heh, I learned all this stuff hanging around here!)

 

[jazzitupphotography]

thanks! Only problem is that I have windows vista and can't have photoshop

 

[Bitter Jeweler]

I have Vista (hate it) and Photoshop.

?

 

[jazzitupphotography]

hm. my computer guy said there was no way to get photoshop. I almost started crying. I used it more than facebook. Haven't had any problems with Vista aside from that though..

 

[farmerj]

I take a lot of outdoor pictures too. I am actually starting to look at getting a Neutral Density filter set as well as a graduated ND filter.

supposed to help with bright days like this.

 

[Baaaark]

thanks! Only problem is that I have windows vista and can't have photoshop

I have CS3 and Vista. And it loads up in like 2 seconds...

The only thing I will say is to try and do this same exact stuff, only about an hour or two before dusk. Let that sun lose some of its power and try some more. Lighting is SO HARD to get right (for me at least), yet its so dang important.

These are super cool, though. I love your composition, and the people look like they're having a great time (which is hard to portray sometimes). Also the location is WONDERFUL, I mean getting a field with all of those flowers, and the horses haven't eaten them or anything! Good work!

 

[jazzitupphotography]

Thanks guys, I'm going to try a trial version of PS first though. Don't want to buy it to find out it won't work...

I had soooo much trouble with the lighting. It was either too bright or too dark and I was trying to avoid getting wires and manure piles in the pictures. The posts were the least of my worries, but they do look kind of funky when there are only like 1 or 2. To get a nice shot without too many shadows on the faces I had to point towards the road with wires and if I pointed towards the forest I was facing the sun.
UGH, is all I have to say.

I was looking for bright pictures though, so I did lighten a few of the happy looking ones. My greatest fear is that my pictures look completely different on other people's screens because I only see them on my laptop.

haha the flowers and tall green grass weren't an issue since we have about 100 acres of fields all around the farm. I do have a few shots with a nice bouquet in a horse's mouth though.

 

[jazzitupphotography]

Here are a few of my Holly you guys can critique

 

[Baaaark]

Here are a few of my Holly you guys can critique

First one by far. I like the whole head included by far...

Nice doggie.

 

[Bitter Jeweler]

The critique about the fence posts was not because they were in the image, but because they are growing out of peoples heads. Just so you are clear.

 

[Baaaark]

Another suggestion about taking bright (high-key) shots, is to keep them normal inside the camera, and adjust them when you get out of the camera. At least this is what I do. If I don't, I get "clipped" spots on my image that are pure white, and I can't darken them or anything (cause the camera read them as pure white). Whereas if you do it with something like photoshop, you can mess around with it and not have to worry about your camera blowing out your bright spots.

 

[Overread20]

Too much light is just as much a pain to work with as too little light!

Shot 1 ; good pose, but your problem is two fold. First you have a white horse which is very suseptable to being blown out (as has happened) and in the bright sunlight camera meters can get tricked into overexposing - so I nearly always set the camera to underexpose each shot by up to a full stop (either -1 on exposure compensation or underexposure in manual mode); that would help limit the chances of blowout on the white horse. Also the other problem is the angle of lighting - the light is behind your subjects so the faces of the horses and people is being shadowed - which is a big problem as those are the highdetail areas that you want clear in the shot - so turn them around so that the light is lighting the faces (not directly into the sun since then they will all be blinking) and position yourself so that your shooting with the light behind you - say get them to turn left or right then one side of their face would have sunlight on it.

Most of your other shots show good lighting position, but sadly blown highlights whenever the sun is free of the clouds. A big tip is to read up on using your camera histogram - its a very important feature of your camera and is the best way to get an idea if a shot has any overexposed or underexposed areas. Then you can always adjust your settings to compensate and shoot again.

By comarpison your shots taken when the sun was clouded over are showing far more detail and less overexposure (so you have to take note of the sun and when its blocked shift back to normal exposures else you will get very dark shots).

Overall I really like your eye for the shots and most of my gripes have been with techincal issuses and that is mostly the overexposure problem. Metalic bits are likley to always blow out in such lighting so don't worry about them too much, but do try to limit blowing out as much as you can.

Also with regard to vista go to your user account point (that little image in the start menu where you can set your account password and such. In that section look at the list of commands and at the bottom should be "Turn user account control on/off" click it and turn it off )
Finally I like the dog shots, but the second one really needs the rest of his jaw in teh shot I think - it looks rather cropped off as it stands. That or move in closer so that the eye areas are more dominating.

 

[lvcrtrs]

I have Vista on 1 computer and my Elements 3 got hinky when it was installed. Finally it stopped working altogether so I gave up and bought Elements 7. Sometimes I will get the "has stopped working" message that Vista gives us for Office features at times. Vista with Office 2007 is buggy. But overall Elements 7 works with it. I can't speak for the bigger PS programs.