First shot series

SMartin

New member
This is the first picture of four I would like to share and get your opinion on. Let me first say I have no prior experience with DSLR. I bought a Nikon D3100 two weeks ago and have been reading a manual for Digital Photography for Beginners. At this point, I'm not even sure of the settings and was just playing around.

 

Moab Man

Senior Member
I haven't met you before on here so welcome.

1. Over-saturated. This can be a hard one to judge if you're not on a color calibrated monitor. Or the monitor is too dark or bright. It can also be your monitor shows color a bit muted thus many others are seeing the image over-saturated.

2. Your exif data is not on the photo, but it looks like you used a very shallow depth of field. The mid-body area is in focus, the rest gets soft. Need a higher aperture number to increase depth of field so that the entire front to back of its body is in focus. You can get away with the entire body not in focus, but you NEED those eyes in focus. We are naturally drawn to eyes.

3. Consider changing where you are shooting the subject from. I don't know what the environment was, but if you could have gotten around to the other side, gotten lower, and maybe captured the mantis coming over the top of the flower and you looking/shooting up into its eyes... that would look spectacular. Again, I know that may not have been possible and the mantis may have not been that patient. A great rule to follow, when able, is to walk around your subject because you may find a better angle.

4. As a general rule, we don't put the subject smack in the middle of a shot. Look up and study the rule of thirds for composing your photo. It doesn't mean we can't put things in the middle, but knowing when and why is a big part of photography.

Don't take this as a verbal beat down. Photography is an endless journey without a destination - constantly learning!

Here is a quick edit I did with the composition available to me. I brought down the saturation, reduced the darkness of the shadow on its body, and cropped out the dead space from the right side getting its body along the third lines.

Hope this feedback helps.

PS. Someone is going to come along and tell you to post up the exif data (shooting setup: shutter speed, ISO, aperture, lens) you might want to add it.
prayingMantis.jpg
 

Moab Man

Senior Member
That's funny, as much as I brought down the saturation, upon upload it's really saturated again. I've super desaturated it... lets try the upload again and see what happens.

Update: Still cranked up the saturation on upload from super mute in photoshop. LOL

prayingMantis2.jpg
 
Last edited:

pforsell

Senior Member
That's funny, as much as I brought down the saturation, upon upload it's really saturated again. I've super desaturated it... lets try the upload again and see what happens.

Update: Still cranked up the saturation on upload from super mute in photoshop. LOL

You have to set the colorspace to sRGB for web posting. This image has ColorSpace=65535 in EXIF meaning it is uncalibrated, most likely ProPhoto RGB. Web browser just assigns sRGB (does not convert) to the image when displaying it, hence the colors are all over the place.
 

Moab Man

Senior Member
Very good catch. Something in my setup has changed either with an update or an additional software. I wouldn't have thought off the top of my head something in my setup had changed.
 
Top