First Post!

KangarueTheDay · Jan 27, 2015

Hello! This is my second post on TPF. I'm pretty new to photography and would love to start getting some constructive criticism. I took this in South Africa and got lucky with the giraffe's position. Go easy on me! Haha.

tirediron · Jan 27, 2015

Not bad at all. There's not a lot you can do with wild animals in their invironment. They go where they want and when they want. If you have a program such as Adobe's Lightroom, might be worth trying to drop the background highlights a bit and raise the shadow on the giraffe, but otherwise, not much to say.

sm4him · Jan 27, 2015

Welcome to TPF!!

You'll find that the critiques here CAN be a little tougher than what you get in a lot of places, but stick with it, and you'll also find it will help you improve your skills!

You're right, you got a nice pose from the giraffe in this shot--and how fortunate to be able to go somewhere like South Africa, lots of photo ops I'm sure!

My suggestions/thoughts about this photo:
1. Consider cropping so that the giraffe is not right in the middle of the frame. With that long, thin profile, lining it up along the right "rule of thirds" line would enhance the photo, imo. Or, you might consider a portrait crop, to focus in more on the giraffe.
2. A lot of the giraffe is in shadow. I'd select the giraffe and see if you can do a curves adjustment or some dodging to lift those shadows.
3. The yellow grass seems really, really saturated. Was that how it actually looked? Even if it was, it's so bright it draws the eye away from the giraffe. I'd consider toning down the saturation on it.

KangarueTheDay · Jan 27, 2015

Thank you so much for the quick replies! You're definitely right about the grass. It's pretty yellow. That's how the grass was, but I did bump down the saturation a good amount and it really draws more attention to the giraffe. Unfortunately, I don't have any programs that allow me to select specific parts of a photograph to change (not that I know of), so I just tried to lift the shadows of the entire photo. Not sure how it looks to my untrained eye, but I think I like it. Lastly, I cropped the entire photo to just focus on the giraffe, rather than having a lot of noise around it.

sm4him · Jan 27, 2015

What are you using for photo processing? There are some pretty decent free or low cost programs out there that you might want to check into, and most of them should allow you to do the fairly basic stuff like selecting a specific part of the image to edit.

I use Photoshop, so I can't really recommend a freebie, but I know several people use Gimp. There are others as well, just don't remember what they are.

KangarueTheDay · Jan 27, 2015

Currently, I just run mine through iPhoto for very basic editing. But I'll look into some free/low-cost programs to start getting more options. I'll probably end up getting Photoshop upon graduation this year, but, for now, I'll have to stick with something free.