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i like the scene above but i find when you have a very busy scene like this it really helps to try to direct the viewers eyes to some central point.
i find the flowers in the front lower left are about the same focus as the ones in the center with neither being outstandingly sharp so my eye gets confused as to where to look.
im not sure if your doing it but i find manually focusing lets me focus exactly where i want to be. ill concentrate very hard in getting some central subject as the center of focus and then try to get the competitors removed later on by cropping or adding blurr in post processing.
i subtracted lots of distracting competitors for my subjects in the below, most were cropped until i removed everything i though wasnt adding to the photo.
i subscribe to the belief that unlike painting where we decide what to add to the scene ,photography is all about excluding things from the scene. generally if its just something hanging out and not adding to the scene i get rid of it.
i kind of try to set my cropping tool to a fixed 8x10 unless im doing a landscape .. that really forces me to think about whats going to be eliminated from the scene as 8x10 always requires a piece of my photo to be cropped tighter.
these were all surrounded by some bad distractions that pulled your eye away but i blurred or removed most of it to a point that i felt worked. some were shot with flash and small apertures to turn the background black and get rid of the annoying stuff that way.
for some fun assuming you have lightroom or photoshop download a trial version of topaz lens effect. it lets you blurr areas of the photo nicely once you get the hang of it.
Last edited by mathjak107; 03-11-2012 at 04:19 PM..
actually we should all comment on each others posting and turn this into an on going education all of us can learn from so feel free to comment on any of mine and offer tips to improve them as stealing thoughts and ideas from each other is what these threads should be about. we have some really good photographers here and i want to benefit from whats in their heads.
anyway ill comment on the above,.
WATCH THE EXPOSURE ON THE COLOR RED. red blows out so easy leaving flowers with featureless petals that look more like tomato skins.
reds have to be shot darker to preserve all the detail in them. unfourtunetly the single histogram on most lower end cameras dont help. you really need the seprerate rgb histograms so you can keep your reds off the sidewalls.
the single histogram is weighted and shows all is okay but lots of times the reds are blown.
i would also darken the background in postprocessing so the subject really stands out of it.
picture 2 has an issue with the white flowers and white blotch in the background and those nice flowers seem gobbled up by it to my eyes.
i like the scene above but i find when you have a very busy scene like this it really helps to try to direct the viewers eyes to some central point.
i find the flowers in the front lower left are about the same focus as the ones in the center with neither being outstandingly sharp so my eye gets confused as to where to look.
im not sure if your doing it but i find manually focusing lets me focus exactly where i want to be. ill concentrate very hard in getting some central subject as the center of focus and then try to get the competitors removed later on by cropping or adding blurr in post processing.
i subtracted lots of distracting competitors for my subjects in the below, most were cropped until i removed everything i though wasnt adding to the photo.
i subscribe to the belief that unlike painting where we decide what to add to the scene ,photography is all about excluding things from the scene. generally if its just something hanging out and not adding to the scene i get rid of it.
i kind of try to set my cropping tool to a fixed 8x10 unless im doing a landscape .. that really forces me to think about whats going to be eliminated from the scene as 8x10 always requires a piece of my photo to be cropped tighter.
these were all surrounded by some bad distractions that pulled your eye away but i blurred or removed most of it to a point that i felt worked. some were shot with flash and small apertures to turn the background black and get rid of the annoying stuff that way.
for some fun assuming you have lightroom or photoshop download a trial version of topaz lens effect. it lets you blurr areas of the photo nicely once you get the hang of it.
Thanks for the comments. Definitely food for thought. I will relook at the photos. I chose the subject with the field of flowers behind in mind. Sometimes it works sometimes it don't.
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once again those reds are so hard to capture without blowing them out. im not sure why we seem to get more grief out of red than any other color. in fact our digital slrs seem to have trouble just capturing the shade of red in a coke can and cant seem to do it accurately.
einstein running your reds through the histogram show them running right up the side wall showing blow out.
i do find there is detail left in the red so its not as bad as it looks in the histogram.
lately i find myself setting exposure with reds so that the red channel ends about 3/4 of the way to the side wall. that usually leaves everything else to dark and the reds lack punch.
the problem then is there is no way to avoid post processing and thats making post processing almost mandatory when shooting red objects surrounded by bright backgrounds unless you leave the back grounds dark.
i find the reds just lack punch even when left dark like that so i almost always have to process the photo afterwards.
im wondering if full frame sensors do better with reds? floyd?.
i found shooting flowers in manual makes it so much easier to maintain control over the colors . the problems i run into usually is not having the reds blow out when i capture them but since i like to play in post processing it usually happens there but i guess by cutting things back i can control that too but i just dont get the look and punch i want.
such is life i guess for digital photographers.
as careful as i was to avoid blowout in my exposure im still getting some blowout after processing, not alot but its still blowing out.
Last edited by mathjak107; 03-13-2012 at 04:37 AM..
Math, its technically deep orange/red. Haven't had a chance to look up the histogram itself since I took over 200 shots in a span of just couple of hours on Sunday. These are slightly cropped but otherwise straight out of the camera. But reds are indeed tough ones to capture properly. Here's another shot of the same orange-red flower:
Last edited by EinsteinsGhost; 03-13-2012 at 07:15 AM..
A part of the reason for blown highlights would be raised exposure value as I'd just walked out from relatively dark indoors to very bright sunlight and forgot to change it in the camera, and haven't yet looked at it in post-processing. I usually have histogram turned on in the viewfinder as I take pictures but in these cases, I was manually focusing (and in a hurry).
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