Newbie - Check out my first pic

[Dusty909]

Hey guys, I'm brand new to DSLR photography but I bought some books and have been trying to learn as much as I can. Here's my first photo experimenting with shutter speed at a park near where I live. Let me know what you think or if there's anything I can do better!

Thanks!

 

[realitycheck3907]

Hey dusty, im a newb so others will probably help more. I think its a good shot and I think your composition is good. It looks like your focus is on the leaves to the left of the falls and not the rocks or the falls themselves. Which makes the whole photo look blurry to me. Maybe you meant to do this though. And just my opinion but I would move to the right a little and get rid of the leaves on the left.

 

[aprileve]

neat water...but to me it looks more like a painting than a picture.

 

[Pugs]

Hm... the composition is nice. The focus is off. The entire image, including the leaves on the left, is soft. It actually hurts my head a bit as my eye keeps trying to focus, but can't.

I really do like the composition, though. You've got some great lines running at angles through this pic.

 

[dhilberg]

Beautiful shot, great composition.

Like the others mentioned, your image is quite soft. This could be because the focus is off. However, viewing your image's EXIF data reveals you used an aperture of f/36. An aperture this small with soften the image quite substantially because of a phenomenon known as diffraction.

You might try the same shot again with a wider aperture, like f/8 or f/11. It will be much sharper.

 

[Dusty909]

Thanks for the tips guys. Yeah I knew something was off in it but couldn't quite tell what it was. Now that I look again the rocks are a bit out of focus. I think you're right and the camera did focus on the leaves to the left instead of the rocks. I've been having that problem a bit actually... the autofocus is always using the points that I don't want it to. Is it better to maybe disable the other points and just use the center point for autofocus?

 

[Kegger]

Use the center point. If it's focusing like that I'd say that it's set to "closest object" Put it on center and you'll be golden.

As for the picture, a Neutral Density filter would be a great tool for shots like these.