PHOTO ASSIGNMENT #01 - Spring

[M38A1]

Scott-
You too have an 'eye' for framing I haven't developed yet. Nice shots.

I think if you ran your ISO down from 1600 to say, 400 or less, you'd notice a significant difference in quality with reduced 'grain' in the pictures. It's a trade-off between shutter speed, aprature and ISO with the available light, but it looks to me you could come down some on ISO and pick up the colors a bit better.

 

[Tourmeister]

Well, I was not controlling the ISO. I just let the camera pick that. I was surprised to see it so high though... I understand the concepts of how aperture, shutter speed, depth of field, and film speed are related, but I am not good at applying those concepts except in a crude manner.

As for the framing, those are all cropped images, especially the bee pictures. I just look at the original image and try to cut away the distractions. I should spend more time cropping all my images, particularly those from ride reports. I tend to just do a batch resize and maybe a batch rotate, but that is it. I don't mess with the images at all.

 

[txbanditrydr]

Cropping of a picture using software is a ton of fun and can really make the difference between a snapshot and a photograph. Newcomers to digital photography tend to get lulled by this power - something we didn't have when taking the roll into a processing kiosk. As a result, the photographer gets lazy... loses viewfinder awareness and starts getting sloppy with composition because they can simply crop out the unwanted elements later.

One of the main reasons for a DSLR is you get to see what you shoot before actually taking the picture. Once the love affair with post picture processing wanes the photographer will start concentrating on in-camera cropping... maybe walking over a few feet or changing to a longer lens to compress certain details. This will usually result in a higher success ratio of quality pictures taken.

Less cropping means more pixels to play with. Free-hand cropping also leads to goofy aspect ratios that might look nice on a computer screen but won't fit in any picture frame unless it's custom made. Some more common ratios are 3:2 (6"x4" print) and 5:4 (8"x10" print) and sometimes a picture will look better with one ratio and not another due to added/subtracted elements. Always keep a copy of the original shot in case you need to make a specific ratio of crop later.

 

[Tourmeister]

Cropping of a picture using software is a ton of fun and can really make the difference between a snapshot and a photograph. Newcomers to digital photography tend to get lulled by this power - something we didn't have when taking the roll into a processing kiosk. As a result, the photographer gets lazy... loses viewfinder awareness and starts getting sloppy with composition because they can simply crop out the unwanted elements later.

One of the main reasons for a DSLR is you get to see what you shoot before actually taking the picture. Once the love affair with post picture processing wanes the photographer will start concentrating on in-camera cropping... maybe walking over a few feet or changing to a longer lens to compress certain details. This will usually result in a higher success ratio of quality pictures taken.

Less cropping means more pixels to play with. Free-hand cropping also leads to goofy aspect ratios that might look nice on a computer screen but won't fit in any picture frame unless it's custom made. Some more common ratios are 3:2 (6"x4" print) and 5:4 (8"x10" print) and sometimes a picture will look better with one ratio and not another due to added/subtracted elements. Always keep a copy of the original shot in case you need to make a specific ratio of crop later.

Very true. I use a two level approach. First I try to do the cropping through the view finder like you mention, by moving back or getting closer, zooming in or out, and changing my location. However, the camera forces a particular rectangular aspect ratio, horizontal or vertical. So I try to do what I can within these constraints. Then once I get the image, I look at it again and do a software crop if I think it makes for a better image. However, I ALWAYS save all my original images in case I want to make changes later, say for making the image fit a standard print out size for framing. Some programs will force the crop to maintain a particular aspect ratio if you want.

Another thing I try to do is to focus on everything in the viewfinder and not just the subject. This helps me keep distracting stuff out of the picture... sometimes. There is not always time to make a perfect composition and still capture the moment. Like most things in life, perfection is the goal but more often than not, compromise is the reality

 

[Tracker]

The robins were out today.

cropped down. Unfortunately, that doesn't leave many pixels for larger prints.