Rainy Day Piano

NathanKing · Jun 14, 2013

I'm completely new to photography. Since it's rainy today I thought I would practice making a set of photographs with my piano as the subject. I really studied it from different angles and snapped a few (what I think are) interesting and fairly well composed shots. If you have the time I would appreciate your critique. :hail:

Which are the best? What makes them stronger than the others? If you think I don't know the first thing about anything and are unable to find a drop of redeeming aesthetic value from the photos and think they are complete trash feel free to let me know that too...I can take it. These were taken with an Olympus E-PL5 with the 45mm f/1.8 lens. They were opened in Adobe and adjusted for white balance with no other post processing.

tirediron · Jun 14, 2013

Shots like this need context; for instance purely as an abstract, I quite like the first one, but I would suggest re-shooting and composing so that the "open" area in the upper RH corner is filled (Or crop it out, but that weakens the image IMO). #3 just has too much out-of-focus for my taste, and the others are nice, techically good, interesting images.

NathanKing · Jun 14, 2013

I agree with your comment on #3. I kept decreasing the size of my aperture, but my depth of field never appeared to increase. The only difference it made was to require a slower shutter speed. How does one go about giving context? Open up the shot so that it's instantly recognizable as a piano?

Thank you for your feedback.

Designer · Jun 14, 2013

I could see doing shots like these only with a deeper DOF. The shallow DOF is distracting.

tirediron · Jun 14, 2013

NathanKing said:
I agree with your comment on #3. I kept decreasing the size of my aperture, but my depth of field never appeared to increase. The only difference it made was to require a slower shutter speed. How does one go about giving context? Open up the shot so that it's instantly recognizable as a piano?

Thank you for your feedback.

Context can be as simple as explaining what your intent or vision is. As far as DoF goes, read up on Focus Stacking.