A plant

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Nature Photography Image Critique : One Thread

(On my monitor, the background looks like digitally manipulated. Not the case - it's that the guy who did the scanning "improved" it with format change and compression.)

-- Jana Mullerova (jam@terma.com), October 28, 1998

Answers

Jana,

This is one of the most difficult situations for photographing plants: a spindly, tall specimen where you don't want a frame-filling close-up of specific details and most of the film area is background. Shooting with ambient light invariably gives lots of unwanted and unnecessary emphasis to the background (assuming that the foreground has been "gardened" away) unless you can arrange to have a deep shadow fall on it.

That is what I suggest you do in your next attempt on this subject - bring some kind of opaque material and supports that will throw a shadow on the background allowing the subject to be separated by the brightness difference. Alternatively, if you have the equipment, flash could be used for the same effect, but you won't be able to see the effect until you get your film developed and it will take a bit more effort as you will need diffusers and/or reflectors to get nice light from the flash.

Since you cut off the very top of the plant and the lower stem is a bare twig, they don't contribute anything to the composition. It would improve the image to simply exclude them and concentrate on the part of the stem with the green leaves. That would accomplish two things: remove a lot extraneous matter (especially those small, nearly horizontal dead twigs) and expand the subject's area on the film relative to the background, making composing easier and the image more interesting. I would be better yet to find several of the subject plants and make a composition of them as a close group.

More care is needed in keeping all of the subject in focus, too, as the top of the stem appears much sharper than the bottom.

Frank

-- Frank Kolwicz (bb389@lafn.org), October 28, 1998.


Frank gave you very good suggestions. You could make this more interesting if you cropped away the left and the right side for an ultra-elongated vertical "landscape" format. Still, the missing top of this plant bothers me...

-- (andreas@physio.unr.edu), November 01, 1998.

The strongest part of this image is its colors. The weakest part is the subject and its composition. The subject is not strong enough for selective focus in order carry the photograph.

-- Bahman Farzad (cpgbooks@mindspring.com), November 01, 1998.

Moderation questions? read the FAQ