Which of my fall photos should I enter? (Dial up warning!)

(and would your choice be different if you were not planning on entering a competing photo....tee hee....:silly: )

Fly Away


Potential


Harvest (1)


Canopy (Or...just for F.Gordon, My Zen Moment)


Harvest (2)


Thanks!

I've asked that it be moved, but if you happen to catch this while it's still misposted and like the photos drop into the photography forum - there's lots more there!

:eyes:

I am usually so obsessive that I double and triple check everything, preview umpteen times, make minute corrections to grammar and spelling, run spell check before and after I preview the post, then I hit post.

Did all that, but since I though I knew where I was (obviously a mistake) I didn't check the location line at the top of the page. :blush:

I've been told it can't be moved to the forum, but I can repost it there. That seems a bit much since I'm getting wonderful feedback here, so I guess I'll just leave it alone.

Different shades of Green, Red, yellow all are soothing to the eye.:crazy:

Fly Away and Potential were taken using macro, with the flash turned off (but otherwise automatic settings), the other three were taken without flash, but otherwise the point and shoot settings.

I chose the camera so I could get good point and shoot pictures, as well as to be able to control shutter speed, F-stop, and ASA (more sophisticated digital cameras do have ASA settings). In practice the camera does such a good job I don't play as much as I probably should.

That of course is judging be the images as presented here.

Fly Away should be rated higher in the poll. It has great composition.

My daughter thought Fly Away should be cropped differently....so I let her try and she ended up with almost identical cropping.

Based on your avatar, you might appreciate http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=280&topic_id=7546

(Taken about 20 miles east of Grand Island)

You will do better if you don't crop at all.

Compose in the camera.

And there are a lot of folks who agree with you.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of that sentiment comes from lack of knowledge that the physical darkroom has always been an integral part of creating great photographs. Now that an electronic darkroom is accessible to anyone who has a few dollars, the secret is sort of out. What most people don't realize is that this has been going on for years in a non-electronic format, including by master photographers (like Ansel Adams http://www.naturephotographers.net/articles0703/mg0703-1.html). If you've spent much time in a traditional darkroom and open up any electronic darkroom you will discover that many of the electronic tools bear the names of their traditional counterparts.

I came to photography through a traditional darkroom, and have always viewed the darkroom as an integral part of creating the photograph. I left it for over two decades (aside from vacation/family photography) mostly because I could not afford to maintain a physical darkroom, and am finally thrilled to be able to get back into photography which, for me, includes the electronic darkroom. It is a mystery to my why the techniques I always used in my traditional darkroom (cropping being one of them) are suddenly viewed as a little dirty just because my darkroom is now electronic.

Just on the single technique of cropping, what artistic difference is there between cropping in the camera (by zooming in closer) versus doing the same cropping in a darkroom?

with, so they can be blown up without looking grainy.

It's also that I have a formalist aesthetic, and a desire to see all the information that was there at the instant of the photo taking.

It is a personal preference, as is this poll.

However, many judges feel the same way, and will check the grain.

that if you send any of your work to a commercial printer (or print it yourself on a standard paper size) the work is cropped. For example, a 3x5 image has 14% more relative length than an 8x11 format. (To keep all of what you see in the 3x5, the 8x11 would need to be 8x12.8.)

Some of my cropping is done to improve the composition in a way that theoretically could have been done in the camera. Some, however, is done to create a composition that is impossible to create in my camera. For example, the length to width ratio of the digital rectangle is not always well suited to the artistic impression I want to create. For example, here: http://photogroup.smugmug.com/gallery/681553/2/29766851. I wanted to create the sense I had when I was physically present of the mesa extending across the wide open horizon. That impression is far stronger when the canvas is over twice as long as it is high. Since my camera shoots at around 1.67:1, it is not composition I could have done solely in my camera.

That said, it is certainly a valuable artistic exercise to see how close I can come to the perfect composition using just my camera.

frame.

I don't like the way most commercial printers cut off the edges, but if I did have to resort to using them them, I suppose I'd just have to accept that.

since you're obviously set up to trim (or matt) the actual image size.

I use two commercial online printers (both of which would normally enhance the photos and crop based on paper size), and can mark the photos so that they do not crop or adjust for color/contrast/etc. Shutterfly is one, but I don't recall the name of the other off the top of my head.

Whenever I'm doing something professional (for a print contest or exhibition) I use commercial printers since the ink used in (most) home printing technology isn't as durable as commercial printing.

PM me if you want more details about making commercial printers not crop your images - it's more detailed than is probably helpful here.

It reminds me of a scene from House of Flying Daggers. :D

I'm not familiar with it.

Most of it was filmed outdoors, in the Ukraine. It's one of the most visually beautiful films I've ever seen. The other one is called Hero, I think it's by the same director, and that film also has an autumn motif.

I highly recommend both for rental if you liked Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

not the fall. Do you live in part of the country where the Maples go to seed in the fall?

but I like #3

That is part of what attracted me to the tree full of oddly out of season babies. They just never left the mom last spring.

The colors in the photo are gorgeous! My second pick would be Harvest (2).

They are all great pics, by the way.

All I did was hang out in the right spot at the right time to catch all the color.

Potential was in my front yard - the burning bushes were fantastic all over NE Ohio this year.

.... but they are all beautiful. Good luck with your entry! :)

I like all of them!! AAARG!!
I want to LIVE in #3, though.

If I lived in #3 it would cut my commute by 2/3!

For some reason.

I liked it because the rest are a bit too monochromatic in theme...where the Canopy has a real nice variation between the light and dark colors.

All are very nice though.

The color contrast was one of the things that made me take the shot - two distinc leaf colors, with the dark seeds that were leftover from spring.

so that is my choice. Nice depth of field selection there. I too am a student of photography. I kinda like Harvest because it uses the rule of thirds for the horizontals but I found myself wanting a subject for the vertical. Perhaps those thistles could have been used for this although my eye kept drifting into that cluster of buildings off in the distant center. If that scene is still there take a female friend dressed in white and pose her walking through that field, have her close enough to tell what she is but not so close as to recognize her. If you can get her onto either vertical thirds-line so much the better. My minds-eye sees this suggestion in Black and White. That spot is powerfully beautiful, no wonder it attracted you with your camera.

(also: I hope to not sound like some kind of expert with my suggestions. I love photography and have done it for decades. When I look at someone else's art, especially attractive stuff like yours, I criticize it as though it were my own. For me, my skills grow through self criticism of the final image. I then take those criticisms to heart when next I shoot similar scenes.)

I took a number of fields trying to get the depth of field just right - so it is nice to have it noticed.

I couldn't get the thistles where I wanted them - I had to stand along a relatively busy highway and duck around a couple of telephone poles to get the shot. I wanted a particular chunk of the tree line in the shot, and couldn't get that chunk with the depth of field, without the thistles. So I tried centering and raising them (Harvest 2), and lowering them (Harvest 1), but nothing quite worked.

Unfortunately, the scene disappeared as the result of a big wind last weekend :(

If you come hang out in the Photography forum there's lots more photos looking for appreciation and improvements (and most of us are actively looking for suggestions). That's where I intended this poll to be posted, but I got klutzy :blush:

As I noted above, this was an "oops" post here (it was supposed to be in the photography forum) - but it was a nice "oops" because of all of the great feedback you've given me!