Your photos (174) |
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 Hints and tips by Philip Grosset If you'd like to submit photos for criticism, click here. |
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with comments from Philip Grosset "Well heres one I took In Brooklyn New York with my Sony DSC-P51 digital camera.It was a payphone that was broken and beat up I tried to get a good perspective to try and give the photo some emotion. What do you think of it?" (Darek Gil) |
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| Your photo on the left is effectively composed and certainly communicates the derelict feeling you were after, and it's made more interesting by the pattern of light and shade on the ground. But given a subject like this, there's no end to the experiments that could be made! On the right, I've tried moving the phone further away from the stand so that it stands out more clearly, and I've concentrated more on it and the light and shade on the ground. Ideally, I'd also have liked to experiment with the shadow it might have thrown. I've gone for a vertical format as this seems to better match the strong vertical lines in the picture. You could have been making experiments like this all day - if you were sure the subject was really worth all that effort! "I'm in no way a professional photographer, but I ran into your site and found myself very interested. To be honest with you I never thought of photography involving any skill. I always figured that it was all in the camera, nature (environment, lighting, etc.), and most of all luck. Although I've come to learn that there can be skill involved which can be applied to turn a simple picture into art. So while going through your site I found the submission page. Curious to see if I had taken anything worth submitting, I took a quick scan through my collection of photos I've taken since my first digital camera purchase. Out of the 700+ photos, only a few I found worth more than a mere glance (since most were p&s pictures I'd taken at parties and such). So I would like to submit these two pictures for your comments and/or suggestions. They were taken with my Canon powershot a40. I took these when I first moved to California, in Malibu. They were taken at random with no real consideration on full auto-mode. Tell me what you think. I recently purchased a new digital camera since my last one was stolen. It's a Olympus 3020Z. I got it mostly because of the Olympus lens and price. This is a much better camera than my previous. I plan to use this one to it's max and have some fun! Thank you." (Carlos Andre, Los Angeles, Ca) |
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| I think you need both skill and luck to take really good photos - but the more skill you've got, the less luck you'll need! Your photo on the left shows a very photogenic scene, but I find the shadows distracting - particularly the large unexplained one on the bottom left. If you wanted to show the people's shadows, it might have been better to have featured them much more prominently, so that they became the main subject of the picture. An alternative would be to be exclude them entirely, as I have done on the right. I've had to move in closer here than I'd really want to so as to exclude that strange shadow on the bottom left of your original picture. |
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| This is a more successful photo, although it might have added to the interest if the person on the beach had been nearer the camera so that we could have seen him more clearly. If it's the landscape that you're most interested in, it might have been even better if you'd waited until the cliffs on the left weren't quite so lost in shadow. | ||||||||||||||||||
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Reply from Carlos Andre: "I visited your comments page. Thank you very much for your time and insight." "I'm just an amateur photog trying to take better pics. I take a lot of photos of family and would like to do a little better job and get to keep a few more shots. Here are a couple of shots for analysis?" (Glenn Davis) |
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| You've got an attractive picture on the left, but there's a lot of empty dark space on the left of it so, on the right, I've tried coming in closer, but still kept your subject slightly off-centre. |
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| This is a very happy and effective photo, and the reflections in the sunglasses add to the sense of fun. | ||||||||||||||||||
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| I find the brightly colored frame around your photo on the left very distracting, especially as the frame is a little too light and the photo it contains a little too dark. On the right, I've removed the frame and also lightened the photo so that it can be seen more clearly. It might have been even better if you'd been able to throw the background more out of focus.But it's another really happy picture. | ||||||||||||||||||
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