Random pics. c&c please

[ByeTheWay]

smoothest road for fifty miles, and its outside the petrochemical plant. funny that. no tripod because im not sure if i'm actually allowed to take photos lol.

mallard duck on takeoff.

winters here, get them out.

i'm still new to all this so your c&c is needed please, thanks.

 

[The_Traveler]

OK, my suggestions are these.
1) post one - or maybe two - pictures in one thread, and they should have something in common so that what people say about them makes sense for both. We don't mind multiple posts. Having multiple images, particularly random ones, means that your critique will be spread out and people will ignore the tough ones and concentrate on the easy ones.

2) allow editing on your images. Sometimes, it's incredibly easier to show a suggested change than talk about it.

 

[ByeTheWay]

cool will do.

 

[WesternGuy]

First impressions: (Please number your images as this makes it a lot easier for a reviewer to refer to them - thanks.)

First one - quite underexposed - I like the idea of night time photos of an industrial complex, just make sure that it is not uniquely identifiable.

Second one - need to up the shutter speed as most of this picture is quite blurry, or possibly out of focus. If you are going to take pics of birds taking off, or landing, try and do it so that they fly across your field of view, that way you have a side-shot and don't end up with the east side of a west-bound bird, if you know what I mean.

Third one - a prime example of a scene that has a dynamic range that is larger than your sensor can capture. You end up with a sky that is overexposed, or worse, blown out, and a foreground - the boats and boat area that is underexposed. You can try dodging the boats and the foreground area to lighten them up to see if that will bring out more detail, but this may only work well if you shot this one in raw.

WesternGuy

 

[Frequency]

There may be technical short comings, yet i really like the first for its overall appeal....
Composition is wrong in the second......spacious front required.....
third one is not convincing
Regards

 

[Ysarex]

Welcome to TPF.

I'll expand some on what WesternGuy said about photo #3 (nice shot). He's precisely correct. What you have in this photo is a prohibitive lighting condition. Your subject is backlit and you're shooting directly into the light source which in this case is the overcast sky. The sky is a large enough percentage of the photo that your camera meter set an exposure that didn't blow out the sky. The result of that however is pretty bad underexposure for the boat and foreground. More exposure for the boat and foreground would overexpose the sky so you're stuck with three bad choices:

1. Good exposure for the boat and foreground and a blown overexposed sky.
2. Good exposure for the sky and underexposed boat and foreground.
3. Stab for the middle and they'll both be wrong.

There are solutions but all of the solutions require that you see it coming. You have to recognize the situation for what it is and consciously decide how to deal with it before you trip the shutter. All of the automated systems in all of our cameras will fail in a circumstance like this.

Solution 1: Go photograph something else.
Solution 2: Alter the lighting -- you'd have to bring in lights for the boat and foreground. Tall order that.
Solution 3: In conditions even more extreme than this you can use an HDR technique.
Solution 4: Your camera has the ability to save the raw sensor data as WesternGuy noted. That's massively more data than you get from a camera JPEG. Sophisticated processing skills and software are required. The key here is to expose up to but not over the limit where the sky would burn out and then head home to the computer. What you're really going to be doing then is applying separate processing for the sky, boat and foreground to get something like this:




Joe

 

[ByeTheWay]

Thanks guys, a lot of good info there. Joe, the difference is unbelievable! It was a very overcast and dull day and I totally see what your sayIng. I only shoot in raw now, but I've still got to learn how to post process them and compose the rIght shot. I don't have any software yet other than the Nikon program which came with my camera whIch seems pretty basIc. So I guess that's something else I need to invest in soon.

I'm going out with my camera again tonight so I'll try harder lol.

Frequency, thanks mate, I realized the first pic isn't technically any good before I posted it but it is strangely beautiful considering the subject matter. I think I'll go take some more of this (allowed to or not lol)

Again thanks for the help,

 

[Ysarex]

Thanks guys, a lot of good info there. Joe, the difference is unbelievable! It was a very overcast and dull day and I totally see what your sayIng. I only shoot in raw now, but I've still got to learn how to post process them and compose the rIght shot. I don't have any software yet other than the Nikon program which came with my camera whIch seems pretty basIc. So I guess that's something else I need to invest in soon.

I'm going out with my camera again tonight so I'll try harder lol.

Frequency, thanks mate, I realized the first pic isn't technically any good before I posted it but it is strangely beautiful considering the subject matter. I think I'll go take some more of this (allowed to or not lol)

Again thanks for the help,

If you're on a Windows computer system you can get going using raw files with this free program: RawTherapee In this case don't let free throw you off -- it's excellent software.

Joe