Young Writers Society

Surprise surprise, Payne is here with more photos of the skies!

Alright. My lame attempts at poetry aside, onto the subject at hand. A family friend recently gave me her 'old' Canon because her husband had bought her a new one. After I regained consciousness and picked my jaw up off the floor, I began taking pictures of EVERYTHING. Seriously. It's a problem.

I'm kind of sad I can't do my funky editing anymore (does anyone know any good FREE photo editing software I could use, hmmm?). Anyway, critiques are welcome! Also, I had to use links instead of image tags, 'cause the pics are kind of enormous. Oops. >.>

Golden Clouds
Sunset
These first two were taken while we were driving down a country road one evening. I normally don't like having fence-posts and stuff in the picture, but here I thought it added a nice rustic feel...

Lampshading
I've fallen in love with this color swap feature. >.> I was trying to turn some horses blue the other day...

Red
One of our oldest hens.

First freeze of the year
Ah, the wonders of super macro.

Hey Payne!

This is some really impressive photography! Really! I can't even remember the last time you've posted your art, but let me just say you've definitely improved.

First of all, I think all these pictures have great colors to them. You have a good eye for that!

As for the first two landscape photos, the first one is better. It has more color, it's sharper, and I just like it xD The second one is good too, but didn't have the same punch. The fence is blurry (which is almost unavoidable when taken from inside a car) and the colors don't pop as well. I think in the first pic you had some blue contrast nicely in the sky with the orange clouds.

I really loved the colors in the lampshade one, I have on idea how you did that It reminded me of those museum painting where the artist just chooses like 3 colors and splashes them together and it looks really cool. So I think this was a great picture!

Haha, lovely hen! This is a very clear photo, perfectly centered. We can see all those details on the feathers. The only thing that came to my mind was if you could edit the contrast of the hen up, make it a little bolder. But then again I like the natural and more brownish feathers too. So I'm just rambling!

The last picture could be improved a bit, I think. My main complaint is that there is too much background. Like 90% of the picture is this fuzzy background. To fix this, zoom up nice and close on that crystal and capture as much detail as you can. As it is now, it's a little hard to focus on it and it's not as interesting being this far away from all that icy detail.

Try these programs for free editing (I use them all the time)
Picasa 3
Gimp 2.0
Just google them x) Downloading is a breeze.
Keep in mind that Gimp is more of a drawing program, so you might have to spend some time to learn the features. But both are simple and completely free.

These pictures were really good, and I'll try to get to all of them.

1. This first one was really good. I really liked how the color of the cloud swirled down, kind of like a spiral. However, if I were you, I would try to edit the colors just a little bit, just to make it pop a little more. Also, I know this is minor, but the wires from the telephone poles, I'd try to edit those out somehow, as they were minority distracting. Overall, really good.

2. This one is pretty much like the first. The colors were good, but I'd lighten it up a little bit, just to make it pop. Also, like before, the telephone pole, try to get rid of it if you can.

3. This one is definitely my favorite of all of these. I'm not sure what this is a picture of, but your editing job (if you edited it) is phenomenal. I love the colors of it. There isn't great subject matter, but the colors are spectacular, and I loved it. Great job with this one.

4. This one was good, but it was pretty simplistic. You run into this a lot with animal pictures. I like how the background is all fuzzy, so that it doesn't distract from the picture, but I'd try to focus more on one part of the hen, say the head, and really try to make it pop.

5. I thought this one was pretty cool too. I love when ice freezes over sticks, and you captured this one really well. My only problem with this one is that you have a little too much space in the bottom left corner of just nothingness. Other than that, really good. I like how you managed to capture each little air bubble inside the ice. Really good.

Hope these helped,
Fruit

First, I have to say I love the title of the thread. I was confused for like a second, wondering if this was some crazy art experiment where you were shooting things out of a canon and then- I remembered that it's a type of camera and realised you were obviously being clever.

1. Golden Clouds
There's not much of interest in this one I'm afraid. I've seen more interesting cloud photos and there's nothing that leaps out at me and the (telegraph?) lines are a bit distracting.

2. Sunset
This is nicer but again the lines of the poles in the foreground draw my attention away from the sunset which should be the focus and the line of trees are very flat, not very striking. If you could find somewhere that has a single tree or one tree much taller than the others, that might be a good place to shoot the sunset. Remember the importance of location as well as subject!

3. Lampshading
This is cool. I would love you to photoshop in some shadow puppets or try it again with some black cut-outs to add a little extra something? It would make an awesome background though and I love the yellow highlights.

4. Red
I really like this one! There's great detail, a great pose and a great use of focus. No complaints at all!

5. First Freeze of the Year
This is quite cool. Not sure that it's something I'd want hanging on my wall, but I like the focus and the drop of ice looks really nice. It's possibly my favourite actually in terms of clear, good to look at shot. I'm just not sure what you'd do with it, but maybe in a bathroom or something? I don't know!

Hi Payne!

I'm having fun returning to my photography reviewing! And so you shall be my next victi--I mean...nothing.

1. This is my faaaaaaavourite by far! I love the light, I love the colours and I love the lines. I always bang on about lines in photographs. Basically what I mean by lines is the shapes you can use to pull the eye through the photography. So, for example, with this photo my eye kind of starts along the bottom with the silhouetted trees, going from left to right (because that's how we see things) and then it catches the end of the cloud and sweeps me in a big arc through the image and then chucks me out at the top right of the photo. I always think lines are important in photos because they're the way you travel through the photo and experience it. Hope that made sense! The only shame in this photo is that you have the cables cutting across these awesome lines but aside from editing them out (which I am usually loathe to do) there's not much you can do about them!

2. This one is much less impacting than the previous one. There's this kind of hazy greyness over the whole image that dulls the colours down a fair bit. I also think the composition in this one isn't as good as the previous one. There is too much silhouette and not enough sky so that the silhouette just becomes a massive blob. Maybe if the fence wasn't there and there was less field then it would work better.

3. I'm not really into abstracty photos, I prefer some nice sweeping landscapes but this one is interesting nonetheless. I like the lines and the vibrancy but also vintage nature of the photo. Somehow reminds me of photos from like the seventies or something. Pretty cooool.

4. I like the proximity to the chicken and how you can see the details of the feathers and also how you can see a reflection in the eye. I always think animal photos are much better when there is a reflection or a light in the eye. It makes them seem more alive. I also like the angle and how the background is unfocused. However, this seems a little washed out to me and I think it would benefit from some fiddling in a free photo editing programme like Gimp. I think you need to pull out some of the vibrancy here and then you'd have a stunning photo.

5. I quite like this one. Good job on getting the details that are there so crisp! I get very impatient with close up photography like this. I hate fiddling around until I get the focus right. The light here is also wonderful and I like how it shimmers on the water. My only problem is the too little twigs verging out to the top. They're out of focus and kind of distract the eye but there's not much you can do about it really. That is nature after all!

Anyway, you defnitely have an eye and some talent and I think you definitely need to keep on shooting! I look forward to seeing more from you

If you have any questions then feel free to PM me.

Bex x