Manzanita

[tevo]

I truly admire those of you who are able to make beautiful nature photographs. I walked around for a while today, hiking about the mountains, and I was able to recognize very few opportunities for photographs. I brought back one that I liked. Any advice in this general field of photography? C&C is appreciated.

#1

Manzanita by theofficialtevo, on Flickr

 

[WesternGuy]

Nature photography is a very wide field and I think that you have to decide what part of "nature" you want to photograph. Personally, I have decided that I will concentrate on flowers and birds for a few years. This doesn't mean that I won't try other things should they arise, but these will be my main areas of concentration. Part of recognizing "things to photograph" is learning to see. I know that sounds weird or strange, but you really have to do this. I know that my ability to "see" things from a photographic/image perspective has improved tremendously in the last few years. You can Google the subject, and, as well, check out this book by Bryan Peterson - Learning to See Creatively: Amazon.co.uk: Bryan Peterson: Books. Tom Dinning has produced a series of web articles on "Learning to See". You can find the first one here - Tom Dinning's Images: Learning to See (Part 1) and the following articles can be found in the right-hand sidebar by clicking on the various months.

There are all kinds of books around - just do a search on Amazon on "Nature Photography". As well, there are millions of sites on the web, just Google it and you will get more than you can read in a year or two. My suggestion, assuming you have decided what type of nature photography you want to do, would be to find a couple of photographers whose work you admire and study what they do. I am not suggesting that you copy their work, but by reviewing what they have done might provide you with some inspiration, particularly when it comes to the composition of images in nature photography.

As for the image you have displayed, I am not sure that I like the selective colouring, but that is just me - if you like it, then that's all that counts. My other comment is that the background is very cluttered, in fact, my eye was drawn to the dark "stuff" in the background on the right in the middle of the image, before it settled on your main subject. As for the black and white conversion, I would really like to see the original as the conversion just doesn't have enough contrast or range of tones to be a good conversion - again my opinion. HTH.

WesternGuy