Very good discussion going on here. I've got a photo from Tanzania from almost 2 years ago and am looking at a few different versions. Here is the original and 2 different crops. It was shot at 200mm (the longest I had during the trek), and unfortunately wasn't possible to get any closer at the time.

Any opinions? I do like the black and white, but not sure about the crops, and maybe should do something in between the 2 shown below. Not sure about the white space on left side of the lesser zoomed one.

Thanks for your comments. Seeing as I just learned about bracketing and have never even used a tripod, maybe I am getting a little ahead of myself.

Completely agree with you on the black and white; it works really well here. I do think you need to open up the shadows under his brow a little, so we can see his eyes better.

Personally, of the two crops you posted, I prefer this tighter one. If you did want to go looser, I would try to leaving the aspect ratio at 3:2, placing the subject in the right third of the frame, and cropping in so that the chimp's left eye is directly on the intersection of the right/upper third guidelines. That should leave enough negative space on the left hand side of the frame to give a sense of his environment and by putting him in the right third of the frame you avoid the more distracting foliage between the camera and the chimp. You could then darken the negative space on the left of the frame if you felt it was necessary.

He's been going out in a helicopter. I'm hopefully going to go with him next time.

Subbing - great thread!

Thanks for the good ideas. Below is the updated one based on your suggestions. Btw do you think this photo is worthwhile? My non photography (and very honest) friend said he thought it was pretty mundane. I thought the pose and finger alignment detail made it possibly the best chimp portrait I got over 3 days of shooting there.

Brings a whole new meaning to "chimping"

Of the two crops, I too like the tighter one better. However, I think they both share a common problem. By placing the subject's face in the very centre, the left side of the frame looks emptier than the right, leading to a sense of imbalance that doesn't match the immobile solidity of the pose. Also, the central positioning of the face diminishes the impact of the subject's hand and arm, which could have a prominent effect on the composition. I suggest you move the face to the left, so the face and hand balance, and the head, arm and hand form a swirl.

Whether to keep any identifiable vegetation in the frame is a question of whether you are presenting a formal portrait or an environmental portrait. Both can work

The later version based on Voyeurism's suggestions gives perhaps a more dynamic suggestion, as if the subject is leaning into your space. It certainly is a valid approach. I prefer the more contemplative approach, and without the vegetation, because it apes (if you'll pardon the pun) formal portraiture.

Great work, as usual, Voyeurism. I really like the interior with blue chair, and especially the one of your mum. I wonder though if the first two portraits might not have been a bit better with a longer focal length (assuming there was room to step back to achieve same framing). There seems to me to be a little bit of forward bulging of nose and/or jaw.

Chisness, et al, notice how he is not putting his portrait subject in the middle of the frame?

Syous,

Pay attention to what Voyeurism is saying here, especially the final three paragraphs. Improving requires thinking about what you are doing.

If I could add a bit, it would be to emphasize that you need to decide what it is you are trying to illustrate with the photo, and then think about what you need to include, and what you need to exclude from the frame to get the intended message across.

To take one of your photos as an example, consider the one with the girls blowing bubbles. Considering how it is framed, I almost get the impression you were mostly taking a picture of the nice tree in the centre (if so it is a pity you apply a 16:9 crop to this one) but there just happen to be all sorts of people in the frame (or, on the right edge, partly in the frame). How do they contribute to the picture? If you really are trying to show the tree, they don't help at all. Ideally you crop them out, but some of their positions won't let you. You could wait til they leave, but the ones on the right seem to have settled in for a while. Perhaps you could adjust your shooting position or framing to eliminate them from the frame.

The other approach, when you can't get rid of the people, is to make the people what the picture is about. One way to do that is by framing/cropping.

This is a picture about two girls blowing bubbles under a tree in a park:




This is a picture of girls blowing bubbles at a guy who is ignoring them:



Neither of these is great but I'd suggest each is better than the original, for a number of reasons:

• The elimination of noticeable but extraneous details (in this case, people) makes it more obvious what the subject matter is.
• In each case, the main subject - the two bubble-blowing girls, is balanced, in one case by the tree and in the other by the guy ignoring them.
• The bubbles are going somewhere - either endlessly out into the open space on the right, or at the target.

I used different aspect ratios deliberately. In the second one, since the story is the linear row of bubbles moving from girls to guy, I used a very wide aspect ratio of 2:1 to emphasize the horizontal motion. The tree trunk was a dividing element. Only the trunk is important for this, so I could afford to crop out the foliage. In the first picture I use a taller aspect ratio to preserve as much of the tree as possible, because, in this one, the tree is a balancing element.

Thanks DTM. I'm still not sure which I like of the now many alternatives. Also TIL what chimping means in the digital camera world

By the way I think I made a pretty big mistake of shooting these at only 1/200. If I could go back (well I guess I can and hope to), I would bump up the ISO to make sure things are sharper.

Great to hear unique suggestions. My default plan in these situations is to put the head on the right side since the eyes/lean of the head are slightly to the left (more like the crop based on Voyeur's suggestion), but I thought maybe it was a bit awkward in this case.

Also I try to keep the proportions at the default (is there any reason why I'm doing this?).

I would definitely not have considered putting the face on the left side, which does create that cool swirl effect. I'm not sure which I like the most, but it is very good to think about all these approaches.

I feel like I've been spamming this thread in the last week or so - I guess I'm more of an attention whore than I thought, but I'm not going to let that realisation stop me. I was going to post the before/after shots, but that seemed self-indulgent so you're getting of lightly.

I've been watching some tutorial videos (links below, highly recommended - very powerful techniques explained in a manner simple enough that even a dolt like me can understand them) and learning some more advanced post-processing techniques (mainly for doing landscapes, but I'm sure there are other uses) over the last couple of weeks, and I guess that's inspired me to post here. It also inspired me to actually process some images, so I was looking for landscape shots to try them out on and found this while combing through the darker reaches of my Lightroom catalogue:

The Beach at Southerndown



This was shot in July 2012, only a couple of months after I started to get interested in Photography, with my rusty trusty Canon 450D and 18-55mm kit lens, 0.6s @ 18mm, f/20 and ISO100. I persuaded my then girlfriend get up at stupid-o-clock to and drive me 20 miles to this beach with the promise of a romantic sunrise together, only for the spectacular sunrise I had envisaged never to appear while I (obviously) spent the whole time fiddling with my camera and ignoring her. The composition isn't the greatest (back then I thought any beach shot with some rocks in the foreground looked amazing), but I don't think it's too bad - I took a lot of really terrible shots that morning.

As for the post-processing, some initial adjustments were made in Lightroom then the heavy lifting was done in Photoshop CC using all kinds of techniques that I'd never used before.

The tutorials in question are :

Michael Breitung's "Start to Finish Video Tutorial"
Sean Bagshaw's "The Complete Guide to Luminosity Masks"
Tony Kuyper's Photoshop tutorials and actions

Well, by that standard, I must be a much worse spamming attention whore. So for reasons of protecting my self-image, but mostly for the good of the thread, let me urge you not to think that way. Your posts are interesting and very helpful. You make interesting pictures, and the more you post the more others are encouraged to participate. Your willingness to answer questions and provide criticism, input and information is much appreciated.

OK, I'll bite: can we see the before shot, please? I think it would be instructional to see the degree of change possible.

Thanks for these.

The before shot (this has lens correction, but no other adjustments):

Amazing transformation! I am just getting into digital photography. I am overwhelmed right now by Lightroom/photoshop and making it my goal this summer to learn how to use them.

How much time, work, effort did it take to get from this before shot to the finished product?

Thanks - this probably took me 2-3 hours, but I think a big chunk of that was because I was using a lot of new (to me) techniques. Probably if I had to go back and do it again it would only take an hour or so.

In terms of learning this stuff, I would say definitely start off with just Lightroom or mostly Lightroom. The learning curve is much easier and you'll very quickly start producing images that look great, which is what it's all about really. There are certain things that Lightroom simply can't do, like combining multiple images for panoramas or dynamic range, so you would have to do that in Photoshop - I would still suggest bringing the resulting image back into Lightroom to make your adjustments rather than trying to do the whole thing in Photoshop, at least initially.

Once you start to find that you can look at the RAW file and visualise where you want to take the image and what adjustments you need to make in order to get there, rather than just trying things to see what works for a particular image, you will probably find you start wanting a finer grain of control than Lightroom can give you - this is probably the time to start looking at Photoshop in a bit more depth.

Also, most importantly, make sure that let us see your images and post any questions ITT... and then clear your schedule for the next 16 hours so that you have time to read DoTheMath's reply

The season of golf action pictures is upon us (I'll try not to flood the thread too much)


Scott by Spottswoode, on Flickr

Scott by Spottswoode, on Flickr


Keith by Spottswoode, on Flickr

Liam by Spottswoode, on Flickr

Can anyone give some advice/references on how to create shots like this?

The technique is called panning. I'm sure you can find quite a few tutorials on it, like this one from Digital Photography School.

http://digital-photography-school.co...rt-of-panning/

Thanks, the tutorial sounds quite easy in theory, so I think it will just take lots of practice

While the photo was probably produced by panning, there is a possibility it was produced by tracking, or a combination of tracking and panning.

Panning means rotating the camera about a fixed vertical axis.

Tracking means moving the camera along a fixed horizontal axis, parallel to the subject. Usually this is done with a dolly on tracks, but it can also be done in/on any vehicle on a smooth surface.

Vehicle tracking seems a lot more likely than someone standing on the ground being lucky/unlucky enough to get that shot.

that almost looks like the photographer edited it using the motion blur filter w/ mask

It's probably a combination of panning and editing.

You need to use a slow shutter speed to get this effect. It takes some practice and trial and error to get some good results.

Any criticisms for the following? I feel like it's a good composition, but I could use a little work in post-processing.


Sunset over the Rouge by Spottswoode, on Flickr

there's barcode scanners for the iphone right?