On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 08:42:34AM -0700, Sasha Sobol wrote: > > What is it that you were trying to achieve? Perhaps someone could tell > > you what you might try differently. > Trying to put down ideas is > I had an idea of juxtaposing the bud in front and the open flower in the back. > I saw that as two copies of the same bud, separated in time. > Obviously it did not work.
I never even saw the flower in the back it was so out of focus. Giving advice is the easy part: The first thing that I'd do differently is more depth of field. It also looks to me that you focused on the stem, rather than the bud. Compositionally, the stem detracts from your concept. Just cropping right below the bud would make it more apparant that the picture was about the bud, rather than the twig. If I were to try to shoot your concept, I'd try to find a bud and flower that were fairly close together so that they could be in focus, or at least one in focus, and the other still recognizable, and yet have everything else out of focus. I'd also try various angles. One would be a shot where they were lined up, with the bud directly in line with the open flower. Possibly shooting from further away with a longer lens (for some value of "far" and "long") to flatten the perspective. Shooting film, I'd also try a double exposure, but that's probably trivial with layers in photoshop and varying the transparency. line the stems up > > > Last fall, driving home from a dance event in Seattle, I stopped to > > shoot some landscape. While there I came across a dead pigeon. While > > shooting it, I remembered that someone had left a rose in my van (I > > had given her a ride to the airport, it wasn't a gift for me). I > > thought that the juxtaposition would be fun, but alas my skills > > weren't up to my imagination: > > http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/sets/72157610185421629/ > The picture is fun, but it seems it could be better (but I do not have > a recipe). The lighting is a bit harsh, I should have used some fill on it. Focus is a bit off, I should have used more depth of field, manual focus and a tripod, rather than hand holding and letting autofocus do it's thing. The background is a bit too busy, perhaps putting them on some dark cloth, or moving them to dirt, or even the pavement, would have helped. I also should have noted the number on the tag and reported the pigeon. It was frustrating that basically none of the shots I particularly liked from the non dance part of that trip turned out. Though I guess I have some dead tractor ones that I never got around to working with. -- The fastest way to get your question answered on the net is to post the wrong answer. Larry Colen [email protected] http://www.red4est.com/lrc -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
