Am an aspiring amateur photographer. please check out some of my work.would appreciate even more if you could take your time to critique them! :) thanks !
Am an aspiring amateur photographer. please check out some of my work.would appreciate even more if you could take your time to critique them! :) thanks !
I have to address the first two photos. My eyes hurt when I look at them. For some reason the soft glow 'soap opera' look is really popular in landscape photography. It is a horrible trend. It literally hurts my eyes.
I think you're on the right track with the other photos though. I'd say, play with your focal points, angles, and subjects, watch out for dead space, and always think, rethink and re shoot your compositions.
I like the idea behind the third photo. If it were me personally, I would have shot at a lower angle to get more sky, and less electric polls. I would also either bracket or underexpose the image to save the highlights. Besides that, it's a good concept.
I feel like I would have enjoyed the 6th image more if you were able to get closer to your subject (log). Your subject is also just slightly to the left which feels awkward. I would have either centered it or had it on either the right or left side of the frame.
Thanks for sharing, and sorry for the harsh words about the soft glow images. I guess a lot of people like it, but I just don't understand it. It seems to be a trend, and trends will always fade away and be looked back upon with a 'what the heck were we thinking' attitude. In other words, trends are dumb (I admit to following some as well. Trying to not do that so much). Try to find your own unique style and stick with it! That will make your photos more unique instead of trendy, and will usually last the test of time.
It's interesting to scroll through these images. They're getting better and better. The first two.. Well, i agree with Kevin. This soft glow looks.. Uh, well... Strange.
The first photo isn't really a bad one. I mean, there's a person in the middle (nice position in this case!), the trees could work, etc. But the final photo just doesn't work this way. I think it's not just the strange glow (which removes contrast, by the way), it's also the light and the heavy textured background. These things together are... Just too much.
The second photo, well.. I see you have these rocks in the foreground, something in the middle to make it interesting and a really nice, colorful, cloudy background. But again this strange glow... I think it's not working that good because the foreground's just too bright. I guess you pulled up the shadows around these rocks? It looks too unrealistic to fit, the rest of the photo wouldn't be that dark if the darker parts in the foreground were that bright. So it looks out of place.
And i think the composition doesn't really work. These rocks in the foreground are way too prominent. Especially because they use so much space in the photo, compared to the other parts (which are more interesting in my opinion) and are too bright (our eyes love bright things and are attracted by them, so it's not really useful to hold the eyes in the foreground, if there are so much better shapes in the back. But these rocks are good as foreground elements, don't get me wrong. I think they take too much space and are too bright.
Then, the third one. I like that. The drops are really nice and the green color of the grass is.. Uh, well, it's a nice green. :D I like the combination of that with the almost black trees in the background. That's a nice combination. Works. :) The sky could be more interesting, of course. He almost looks like you were using a graduated, colored filter there. But hey it's getting much better. :)
And the 4th is again much better. The colors are cool, the sky is really interesting, really nice and colorful, the reflection's cool, the things in the foreground are interesting... Maybe if i had to say what could be done even better, it would be the positioning of the foreground elements. There's a rock and those poles with the fishing net, both are in the left side of the photo, but there's nothing with the same "weight" in the other half. I know it's hard to balance that out, and i don't even know what you could do to minimize that effect (well, several steps to the right and then turning the camera more to the left, letting the fishing net be a more prominent thing in the center area could(!) work, but i don't know how the place looked like and if it was possible to do that). But this photo has a really cool mood.. Nice feeling.
The next photo, well, there's not much to say, i guess. The combination of the two colors just.. Works.And i don't know if it would look better if the horizont wouldn't be exactly in the middle. Same thing with the main subject. I'm not really a fan of this "hey, rule of thirds! your photo isn't good because you centered the horizon line and centered the main subject!".. Sometimes it HAS to be that way to work. And maybe this is one of these photos. Long blabla just to say: I like it, nothing to complain or criticize. :]
Then, there's the one with this wooden thingy as main subject. I like long exposures, really. And coloured skies. And strange wooden things looking out of the water. And it's interesting how the photo's.. split in half. The left side is red/orange, the right side (dark) blue. Thats kinda nice. Beside that, i think Kevin already said enough about that wooden thing.
Hmm and then, there's the last one. I could talk about some interesting shapes, etc.. But after all, it's just the back of a dog... See that bent ridge in the background? Where the mountain's split into the bright side and shadowy dark side? The head of the dog just breaks that line. But.. Well, it's still just a photo of a dog's back. It looks like the moment before he turned his head and looked really nice or funny. Or after that moment. But with a wide aperture to blur out the background, it could be a nice dog portrait. Well, if he's looking towards the camera, not in the opposite direction.