Looking for honest feedback

I feel like technically my pics are decent, but I struggle to take interesting shots if the scene doesn't jump out at me. I doubt I am the only one, but nonetheless I am looking for feedback on composition, post processing...anything that you think I might have not done as well as I could have.

06 by GlebZ, on Flickr

05 by GlebZ, on Flickr

02 by GlebZ, on Flickr

I think the general rule here is to post one photo at a time.
Hard to give a critique on several at the same time

I would encourage you to just keep shooting daily. You will eventually get better and understand the concepts such as composition, post processing, and the like on a deeper level that you refer to above. People can talk you through it till you are blue in the face but you must go do it to really get it.

One place where you might start is the light. Photographs are about light..or the lack of light. The correct term in this context would probably be contrast. Study it. Think about it. Look for it. Keep coming back to it over and over. Shoot at sunrise and sunset. Shoot by a north window. Look for lightwells. Find a lightwell and wait for the moment some unexpected subject occupies the lightwell. That kind of thing.

Not to be harsh but the photos you show just don't mean much to me photographically speaking. They just show that you have come along a little ways and you need to keep practicing. You will get there and you will find your groove, your own unique vision and style, but you must work at it.

Keep it up! It can be a very fulfilling pursuit.

From a technical perspective your photos look great to me. What I personally find lacking, overall, is engagement. By that I mean there's really no clear subject that grabs and/or holds my attention. In my experience learning to compose a good shot is not something that simply happens after you take enough shots, you have to really WORK at it. You have to learn the principles and how to apply them and then you can start bending them and breaking them... Effectively. There are a lot of good resources online that will teach you some basic guidelines, things like the Rule of Thirds, Pattern, Repetition, Juxtaposition, Leading Lines, Symmetry, S-Curves, etc.

A really superb book on the subject of composition is Roberto Valenzuela's, Picture Perfect Practice. If I could have only one book on composition on my bookshelf, this would be it.

Almost as essential, in my opinion, is Michael Freeman's, The Photographer's Eye.

I also love this video: Photography Composition Basics. The production values might leave something to be desired, but there's about a metric ton very solid information in that 20-minute video. I watch it from time to time just to refresh my own thinking on composition.

....

Keep going its sometimes tough to get them just right but hey thats part of the fun of Photography.........

The all seem to be flat when it comes to the light.

1. This one could use a tad of straightening so the buildings on the left are corrected. The color of the water is not pretty and is dull overall. Perhaps get an ND filter that would allow the water to smooth out and to possibly offer more of a reflection.

2. At f/11 with a 24mm lens, your focus is way off. If you wanted to blur the front leaf, use a larger aperture. It looks like you might have focused on the buildings. Since you included the leaf as a foreground element, try focusing 1/3 of the way into your image. Or if you really wanted to blur that leaf, focus further back with a larger aperture. When using f/11, it is to keep a lot of the image in sharp focus so focus is off.

3. The lighting is dull and drab. Although branches can be useful for framing, I don't like it here. What it reminds me of is a comb-over by a guy who doesn't have a lot of hair. The sky could have stood by itself with all those clouds.

Thanks for the feedback, very much appreciated.

Cindy, the first shot was with a ND filter, it was a 20 second exposure.

glebulon said:

Thanks for the feedback, very much appreciated.

Cindy, the first shot was with a ND filter, it was a 20 second exposure.

Click to expand...

I wonder if you included a circular polarizer with the ND filter if that might allow more clearness to the water Would be nice to have more reflection...if possible. The water might just be extremely murky.

Cindy mentioned "flat", and I agree that seems the main problem. IMO, there's nothing else wrong with the pictures, they are good pictures. But my simple notion is that they are all slightly too dark. A histogram now shows all have slight clipping, but that is predominately the added white Facebook lettering (added as 255). Just slightly more, but nothing significant in the image is that bright. Why not?

This is definitely just my opinion, and was possibly an intentional choice of yours, and we can't really debate personal choices. I'm just stating mine. I'd make them slightly brighter. It sort of wakes them up.

In the Adobe Levels tool, you do know about the ALT key? Holding ALT key while touching or moving the White Point slider changes the displayed picture (if Preview is On) to show instead only the clipped pixels at that setting (all else is black). Or same thing holding Alt on the Black Point, shows clipping at that end.

Holding the ALT key on the Adobe raw (ACR) Exposure slider does the same thing, shows WHICH pixels are clipped (or the Blacks slider, these are the same Levels tools).

The idea is, some pixels are "don't care" and might be expendable, sometimes. This view helps you to decide the advantages or disadvantages of clipping slightly. Does it help more than it hurts. Of the clipping indicated, exactly WHICH PIXELS are clipped? Do we care?

I would boost brightness of all of these around 1/3 stop. Maybe a bit more? (esp the third picture.. however that could affect the "mood" you might have been trying to show... ) I think it helps bring all of them to life. In my opinion, it does help these, and yet nothing important in the image suffers, or is even noticeable. Just slight areas of sky or lights or window reflections, where there was no detail anyway. Insignificant.

Specifically, on first picture, I would close that small gap at right end of histogram, and maybe slightly more. Levels with ALT shows this is just some background lights and a bit of featureless sky.

In second, I would close the "almost a gap", to more where the data actually sort of starts.
In third, same thing, but quite a lot more, intentional clipping to where the main data peak actually sort of starts to start.

I would examine that procedure with the ALT key as I went to make sure I wasn't missing something important.


However, it is a fact that LCD monitors straight out of the box tend to be quite bright, which is possibly what you see now? Most of us do. And if so, that is of course how you see and adjust them. But on a calibrated monitor, I think slightly dark.

Hi Wayne, I mostly use the histogram for my editing but my monitor is calibrated. I appreciate the comment about making the pics brighter, it was an overcast day so I wanted to keep it looking as such, also I think if I made them brighter I would have no definition in the sky left at all.