Photography
Related: About this forumLearning to walk around the subject
Now that I'm trying to improve my picture taking and graduate from simple snapshots, I'm learning to walk around the subject and look at it from different angles.
Here are a couple interpretations of the area under the pedestrian bridge at Alton Baker Park in Eugene, OR





NV Whino
(20,886 posts)I love these.
handmade34
(23,801 posts)lines, angles, shadows, background noise, etc... so much to consider
thought of you on my bike ride this morning... got a few angles of this part of the path and settled on this view

Speck Tater
(10,618 posts)Interesting view.
Blue_In_AK
(46,436 posts)I especially like the first one. It's amazing how a few steps to the left or right (or shooting from a different height) changes the perspective.
Major Nikon
(36,925 posts)One thing that many amateur photographers try to do is fill up the frame with many diverse and interesting elements. This is usually contrary to a pleasing composition. Sometimes (as with some landscape photography) the subject will fill the entire frame, but with most subjects you want to pick one or two things and isolate them from everything else. This creates a feeling of depth.
Take your 3rd photograph as an example. The subject is the steel supporting element. The subject is isolated from the rest of the picture by contrast because it's darker underneath the bridge, and the photograph is exposed for the subject. I'm not saying you should have, but there are other ways you could have isolated the subject even more. You could have underexposed it which would put more emphasis on the shape of the object. The reason the subject is interesting is not because of its color or texture, but because of its shape. Another way you could have isolated it is by causing the background to go out of focus. If you use a longer lens or longer zoom setting, placed farther back from the subject, and a large aperture setting (smaller f stop number), the background will start to go more out of focus.
Most amateurs starting out want to photograph exactly what they see. However, the problem is the camera is renders a two dimensional image and most subjects are 3 dimensional (or 4 if they are moving). So the challenge is not to photograph what you see with your three dimensional view, but rather to create dimension in the photograph by drawing the eye to the subject. You can do this by color, contrast, focus, framing, and/or by including an element such as a path which draws the eye where you want it to go. So rather than trying to capture what I see, I look at photography more like painting. I want to build my composition by placing items inside it depicted in such a way to provide depth (or sometimes lack of depth which is another subject), but more importantly I want to tell a story about whatever it is that finds itself in front of my lens and I want the viewer to be drawn to that subject.
Celebration
(15,812 posts)I go on kicks where I take every photo with that setting. That made a huge difference when I took photos of some Aztec dancers one time. The worst of my aperture priority photos was better than the best on my regular photos. I need to think about it more often. It's fun to take ducks with aperture priority too!
Major Nikon
(36,925 posts)Most of the rest are taken in manual mode where I want control over both aperture and shutter speed. On rare occassions I'll use shutter priority.
Speck Tater
(10,618 posts)I didn't like the look of the over exposed, washed out background. That's why I bracketed exposures and cut the properly exposed background into the properly exposed foreground with Paintshop Pro.
On several other pictures I took that morning I blurred the background by using AP and opening up to a wide f-stop, but in this case I really wanted the whole thing in focus. In my mind the steel framework was the frame, establishing the foreground, and what looks like "background" is actually the subject. I should go back to that spot and try other options, including your suggestions, so I can compare the results. (I have just made a habit of using AP mode since I'm not shooting anything that moves.)
At any rate, "walking around" should include "fiddling with settings" as well.
There is a difference between "documenting" what we see and "interpreting" what we see. I'm still experimenting to discover what I'm most interested in accomplishing with my photos. It can be fun to document something that is intrinsically interesting, and to dramatize something that is intrinsically boring. I'd like to try both for a while to see what suits me.
Thanks for your suggestions.
On Edit: I should add that I've seen exactly what you talk about when you point out that photos are two-dimensional. It has happened to me over and over in the last few weeks that I will spot some dramatic scene with depth and drama, so I take a picture of it and the picture turns out flat, uninteresting, and bland. It lacks the depth that the real-life scene had. I'm still trying to learn how to see that in real time and somehow capture that depth in my photos.
Major Nikon
(36,925 posts)When you see a photograph you like, try and figure out how the photographer made that shot. See if you can figure out if a wide angle, normal, or telephoto lens was used. See if you can figure out what aperture setting was used. This becomes pretty tricky because wide angle, normal, and telephoto lenses behave very differently even at the same aperture settings. Many of the pictures you find on the web will still have the EXIF data embedded. You can decode them here:
http://regex.info/exif.cgi/
Speck Tater
(10,618 posts)Mira
(22,623 posts)remind me of myself. LOL>
I like the third one because the lines and swirls repeat and are all interrelated. Isn't it fun to just snap away an learn what works and what doesn't.
Great work at learning and experimenting, am I right to remember you just got a new camera? If I'm wrong I'm sorry to be kind of out of the loop.
Speck Tater
(10,618 posts)And yes, I just got a Sony NEX 5N. I love it!