photo-lifestyle.com

Optimizing Your Angle

Here’s another photo critique request my mom sent me. This one is a prime example for a post on optimizing your angle.

I love this mossy bridge in a private Japanese garden. The composition looking down the path set with stepping stones is inviting, and the deep green is refreshing and nourishing. The big tree in the foreground is a beautiful accent that serves to frame the scene.

My photo critique? This is essentially two pictures. One of a mossy bridge leading to an inviting path set with stones in a Japanese garden and another of a large pond with tufts of tall grass and large trees around it. I’m not really sure which to look at, and the pond being in the center of the photo and taking up two thirds of the frame, I feel a bit like if I ventured into the photo I’d walk straight into the water and fall in.

Here’s where optimizing your angle could made all the difference. Imagine how the mossy bridge would look if you were to take just one or two steps to the left and turn your camera to take a portrait style shot instead of a horizontal landscape. Then try taking in just a few more inches of the creek to the right of the bridge to put the path squarely on the one third line as per the rule of thirds.

By optimizing your angle in this way you can bring the large tree in the foreground closer to the path, and cut off much of the expanse of the pond. The eye will be directed straight down the path and you will have a truly frame worthy Japanese garden photo with one theme instead of two.

Thanks to my mom, Carol Wilkinson for this photo critique request. I’d love to see the result if you get a chance to go back to this Japanese garden to take the mossy bridge from a more optimized angle!

Stay tuned for more photo critiques, and let me know if you have a composition to submit.

Cropping a Photo to Reduce Clutter

Here’s a picture of some Japanese rice paddies my mom sent me to do a photo critique on. The rice is a brilliant green. It’s a typical early summer scene in rural Japan and one can understand why she would have wanted to stop the car and get out to take a picture.

I think she’s chosen a great angle. She’s crouched down low enough for us to identify with the rice, and yet stayed high enough to emphasize the individual fields and the way they form a stair step pattern as the land contours up.

Since this is a photo critique, I’ll mention what I don’t like about this photo as well. One has to wonder though whether it was necessary to include the shadow of the car, and whether all the buildings in the background add to the composition. It’s a little unclear whether the subject is indeed the recently planted Japanese rice paddies or the buildings beyond them. The viewer is plunged into a state of uncertainty as to what they should be looking at. The buildings, the trees, the shadow of the car, the Japanese rice paddies and even the thunder clouds in the distance are all clamoring for attention.

This could be a prime example where cropping a photo to reduce clutter may be a good choice. What if we simply remove the car shadow and the apartment and square building, leaving only the one house? The pale red roof adds interest to the photo without fighting with the rice for attention and we have a much cleaner image after getting rid of the shadow and a few of the power line poles.

There are many instances where we end up snapping what we see and then when we get home we realize there’s a lot more going on than we had noticed at the time. Cropping a photo to reduce clutter is often better than simply hoping the viewer notices what we saw in the first place.

I personally like the cropped version of these Japanese rice paddies a lot better. What do you think?

More photo critique posts coming soon. Stay tuned. Also, leave a comment if you’d like to send in a shot for a photo critique.

Photo Critique

Welcome to the Photo Critique corner of Photo Lifestyle dot com.

I recieved this request for a photo critique from Jade Mayari this morning. What a precious baby photo! Here’s what Jade had to say about it:

Here is a baby photo of my daughter laying on a blanket and the sun was not really out that day and it wasn’t overcast either and it made the picture come up better than I expected. It was taken outside with a Kodak Easyshare 4.0megapixel camera but we used the outdoor setting and possibly that’s what made the colors so vibrant? I love the colors in this photo and it’s one of my favorites.

Indeed. I looked up the Kodak Easyshare 4 megapixel and discovered that while some people are unhappy with the slow start-up speed, it focuses quickly, and produces the brightest colors of any pocket digital camera. The new model of the Kodak Easyshare is integrated with Wii for easy storage and sharing, and has a very reasonable price tag. Good camera choice, Jade!

The colors in this adorable baby photo are brilliant, and it’s obvious this kid is full of life. The removed shoe and tousled dress show she’s been squirming big time, and she looks very happy indeed to be outdoors in her colorful clothes and blanket.

As to the photo critique, I feel a bit uneasy about the angle I find myself looking at this photo from. In fact, when I first saw it, it seemed that the subject was mildly upside down, and I caught myself tilting my head to one side to look into the baby’s face.

Here’s the same picture cropped to a more pleasing angle. It’s not a total solution, as I’ve had to hide her precious pudgy feet, but you can see that it would have been a better picture if Jade had just twisted the camera a tiny bit before squeezing the shutter.

One important component in photography that is missing from this photo is depth of field. Depth of field relates to how close and and how far the camera is able to focus, but it also means simply how much close and far you’ve added to your composition. This photo’s basically two dimensional as the baby is on a flat surface, and the photo is taken from a rather high angle. The green grass is so bright and beautiful, it would have been lovely to have a bit more of it, and have some close up in the foreground, and a background of green as well. This could have been achieved by simply kneeling down in the grass, taking the picture from a 45 degree angle, and zooming out a bit to show more grass in the photo. This would have added a three dimensional depth of field, and made the photo a real contest winner.

Next time your in the mood for snapping a baby photo, I’d recommend taking three pictures instead of one. One from above, one from a 45 degree angle, and one from much lower down, almost at the baby’s level to achieve a profile with large grass blades in the foreground. I think you’ll be surprised by how much more you like a photo with more depth of field.

Thanks for the great photo, Jade, and congratulations on your purchase of the Kodak Easyshare 4 megapixel camera. It looks like it was just the right camera for you!