Quote:
Originally Posted by Voyeurism
[A really good critique.]
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.