Photos of Southwest USA - critique wanted

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

Please have a look at my pictures of Southwest United States which were taken from the 14th July to the 21st July 2002. There are about 100 in total. Large 1600 x 1200 versions of each image are available.

http://community.webshots.com/user/scotthunter

To find out more about the trip, visit:

http:// www.planetterragen.btinternet.co.uk.

Thanks.

-- Scott

-- Scott Hunter (hunterscott@btinternet.com), November 16, 2002

Answers

I normally am against the idea that one should only shoot near sunset or sunrise, but that may be because I live in Finland, where the sun shines at a low angle most of the day, most of the year (and when it's near sunset/sunrise, everything turns really blue). However, in this case, the broad views of the canyons suffer from flat light and lifeless skies. I don't know what could be done to improve the situation other than to wait for better light. A decent cloud coverage would help with the broad views. Since obviously you cannot control the weather much, in these conditions I would have probably concentrated more on the detail shots. You have some nice details of the Bryce Canyon in there. It's always good to be critical of the light and crop the lifeless parts of a landscape. Landscape photography is really hard! I fail 99% of the time.

-- Ilkka Nissila (ilkka.nissila@hut.fi), November 16, 2002.

Hello Scott,

I picked up this thread over in the photonet Nature forum. I hadn't bothered to explore the photonet site yet and did not know this linked critique forum existed. As to your images they appear reasonable given the way I suspect you may have gone about shooting and the atmosphere on the days you visited Brice. I won't crtitique your images beyond that but rather give you a view of my own experience their since you would need to do that to bring some shots up to a higher level.

I've shot landscapes seriously for over two decades carrying around a big tripod. Looked at just your images of Brice since that was the image posted in the Nature forum. Generally you did not have the best weather during the time there. Mostly cloudy, a bit hazy, with sun coming through. To get really good shots a day with clear air and a few clouds would help a lot. I've shot Brice with 35mm years ago and know that it is not the easiest place to size up even for an expert. If you shoot 4x5 the options are much better because one can just point the camera at the large mass of hoodoos and get lots of detail. With smaller formats all that interesting detail becomes a mediocre mass of similar colors and shadows. One thing about shooting at the mass of hoodoos is that early light from many perspectives shows too many shadows. Thus a savvy photographer would need to pay their dues and study topo maps and the light at the time of year they were shooting in order to find out when particular locations appeared best. Obviously that means spending more than a couple days there.

Good photography usually takes careful shot planning, logistics, skill, and of course luck with the weather. The better shots I managed were ones where I isolated formations in 8am type light up against a good blue sky. In got up at sunrise and in the morning chill hiked out to areas I had previously surveyed. Then had a couple hours to evaluate the foregrounds and geometry I would be using. By 9:30am the light was too intense on white formations and I had to bag it. Although I spent a couple days just searching for good images, in the end I had to settle for a few shots. Many western national parks are huge and topographically bewildering. One can either just go around shooting like a tourist without regard for sun orientation, time of day, or weather and end up with lots of nice snapshots or try and take away a few prizes by going to work. -David

-- David (davesenesac@msn.com), November 17, 2002.


Scott,

I agree with the comments above. Many of your photos were shot in bad light, and most if not all of them do not seem to me to rise above the level of travel snapshots. They are a great way for you to remember your trip, but to me, they don't carry a lot of weight.

Since I saw your original post on photo.net, I know you're already at least minimally familiar with that site. I would suggest looking through the tutorials on photo.net, which can be found here:

http://www.photo.net/making-photographs/

Might want to browse through the whole section of articles that are accessed on the "Learn" menu bar on photo.net.

A lot of becoming a better photographer is learning how to train your eye to see a "good shot;" the rest is honing the technical skills to capture that good shot. It usually doesn't happen overnight, so be patient.

You probably wanted people to look at your photos and tell you how good they were. That's what your non-photographer friends are for (mine are famous for liking just about all of my shots). here, you ask for a critique, you're going to get criticism, but hopefully it'll be constructive and help you become a better photographer, if you want.

Please read through the articles I linked above, take some more pictures, then come back here and post individual photos. It's a lot easier to critique one photo at a time, and it's a lot more beneficial for you in the long run.

-- Christian Deichert (torgophile@aol.com), November 18, 2002.


I think Christian says it very well. I too have a lot of non-photographer friends who think my images are all great. But a lot of people in the Nature Forum are excellent photographers themselves and they can easily tell the goods and bads in my images. I too was a beginner at one point and even though I have been using SLRs for 30 years, I realize that I am still learning. Hopefully in a couple of years, Scott will look back at these images and agree with some of the comments given here.

For an introduction to landscape photography, several books by American photographer John Shaw are excellent, such as the Field Guide from year 2000 and one on Landscape photography a few years before that (1995 I think). However, there is plenty of overlap in Shaw's book. It is probably not necessary to purchase them all (6 of them I think), although I do have all of them.

-- Shun Cheung (shun@att.net), November 18, 2002.


Moderation questions? read the FAQ