Need more hours in a day. And the weather is against me

I still haven't had any time really to practise taking any more photos. I did have a go last weekend but it was a really bright day and I just didn't manage to get the settings right to get a decent picture. What I was trying for a picture of the lower portion of somebody stood in the grass. I wanted to pick out the texture and colour of the grass as well as the shoes (which I love photographing as anyone who read my previous posts would tell you). I also wanted to photography the garden but the weather was against me so I will try again at the weekend and see what I can come up with.

What to do with your photos

I always think its a shame when you take some photos and then don't really do anything with them. I have hundreds if not thousands of images on my computer and very few of them actually make it into a frame or anything else for that matter. I think perhaps the hardest type of photos to do anything with are the family-snap variety. You now the kind where you have a lovely picture of a building or something and then contaminate it with a picture of someone half smiling - half squinting in front of it. I find these rarely look good in frames and have been looking for other things to do with them. One of the best ideas was scrap booking. You can get some digital scrap booking supplies on-line and then make personalised cards and such for people. I find it adds an interesting slant to the family-snap variety of photos. Here's a few examples of what I'm talking about.

Cropping

Something I have been trying to do in my own photos is to try cropping them to make them a bit more interesting. I do like cropping because I think it engages the viewer in a game of guessing what's happening outside of the photo. It can also be used to hide unwanted aspects in a photo. Take this terrible photo for example. It was taken by a friend about a year ago. The raw photo is terrible (no offence to my friend). I have marks on my face from my glasses, my hair is fuzzy, I'm not smiling and my face somehow looks saggy.



I increased the contrast, brightness and saturation because this is how I like my photos to look. I also erased the background and then cropped the photo in 2 different ways. First I focused on the top half of the face. You can see this picture on my profile. I thought this worked quite well because it provides a hint of what I look like but without giving the game away completely. Once I got the cropped version I noticed how stunning the eyes looked and decided to try cropping further in order to focus on this.


I have another example of good use of cropping here.

Shoes

I do think shoes make interesting subjects and are pretty good for jazzing up or improving the interestingness of photos. I'm heavily biased though because (being a woman) I love shoes :)

I took a photo of my own shoe a while ago and liked the contrast between the dark earth and the brightness and interest of the shoe.




The following 2 photos are not mine but illustrate the kind of thing that I like.

I like a few aspects in the photo below. First off I do appreciate the use of cropping and I'll go into this in another post later. Another thing I like is the pink tinge to the sky and also the contrast between the grey/pink sky and the pink dress. I also think the shoes provide some additional interest and are visually appealing. If I was to take this photo myself I don't think I'd do anything different to this really.


I like the subject in this photo but I do think there are some things that I might of done differently. One thing I would try out is to make the ground B&W and then add some interesting and colourful shoes. Something that contrasts well with the B&W ground and the blue jeans. I'd also use higher contrast and saturation to make the photo appear more dynamic.

People

I love looking a photos of interesting looking people. Unfortunately though I don't really have any willing subjects to allow me to practise photographing this subject much in my own life. Consequently when I do photograph people its usually myself or some unwilling subject. This makes me wonder if people wonder if I am in love with myself LOL. Of course I'm not but I can understand why people would think I am. Anyway since I don't have many photos of interesting people that I have taken myself I have taken to looking at and appreciating other peoples photos of interesting people. I've posted some of these below along with some thoughts on what I might of done differently if this was my own photo. I'm basically using it as a thinking exercise.


I like black and white photos which have just a small splash of colour though I would like to of seen the all colour version of this photo. Looking at the girl I can imagine that were missing a good colour opportunity here. I imagine her wearing bright clothes and perhaps even having colourful hair (pink or purple maybe). So that makes me wonder if this style of photography (B&W with splash of colour) is possibly better suited to environments and subjects that are mostly grey scale or otherwise not particularly colourful. That way I wouldn't be wondering what I'm missing.


I also enjoy looking at photos of people doing interesting things. I'm not sure how much I like this photo even though I like the interestingness of the subject. If I took this myself I'd try to make it more interesting by having the girl wear more interesting or colourful clothes. I would also of made the photo look more dynamic and vibrant by increasing contrast and saturation I think.

Glass

I just found the above photo on my computer. I entered it into a photo of the month on a yuku board a month or 2 ago. The subject was glass. I liked the white and minimalist theme along with the contrast of the blue perfume bottle and the reflection of the flowers.

About the kind of photos that I like

I have gathered together a small collection of photos to demonstrate the kind of things that I'm interested in. Some of these photos are my own, some are other peoples (don't now whose) and some were taken with permission from message boards and such.


I've posted this before but I love the high contrast and high brightness with high saturation. Gets rid of things like blemishes LOL.


I also enjoy black and white photography and architecture. I love the contrast and angles and clean lines in this one (Thanks to Breanna for the photo).


I like the interesting composition and use of contrast, brightness and colour in this photo.

Trip to Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Not perfect but this was my first trip taken with the intention of getting some interesting photos. Some of them really do not work but since this blog is all about showing my improvements then I must also show were I started :)

Click thumbnail to see larger view.

My present camera is...

My present camera is a Sony-T7. now anybody who knows me will now that I have a love-hate relationship with this camera. While it is light weight, slim and robust it is not very intuitive and is pretty rubbish for a point-and-shoot style camera. It is prone to camera shake and let's face it if your looking for a slim and tiny camera then your not going to be wanting to lug a tripod around with you. But anyhow it has other problems as well. It is rubbish (in my opinion) in low light conditions. In low light it look to grainy no matter what ISO you use. Trust me I have played with those setting till I'm blue in the face and I have now reached the conclusion that its a fantastic daytime-day trip camera. But rubbish for just about anything else.

Incase your interested this is the camera.

History of my photography hobby

I've always liked taking photographs ever since I inherited an old camera when I was about 8 years old. I can't remember what type it was but I do remember being accused (maybe rightly so) of snapping just about anything that moved. When I studied art and design at GCSE level I was introduced to black and white photography and I enjoyed learning about contrast and ISO settings and things like that. In fact I enjoyed it so much that I went on to study art and design at A level and opted to make my major project photography and architecture based. Another love of mine is architecture by the way. Anyway back to the photography. I past the art and design A level and thought that was probably the end of the photography. But then dad came home one day claiming that my school were getting rid of some old developing equipment and it was (apparently) just begging to be rescued. By my dad - and only my dad :) So we set up a dark room in the bathroom and enjoyed hiding away in there developing black and white photos. Obviously I had competitive advantage having used the equipment at school for the previous 2 years. I don't think I've got any of those photos now but I think dad still has the dark room (now in the attic I think). Sadly I never had time for much photography after that because I went to university and then with learning a new job I just never got chance. I was just thinking of getting back into photography when my circumstances changed and I ended up going back to university for another 5 years. That brings me to now really. I graduated a year ago and am looking to improve my photography skills. I find that I am ok with the post processing of photos but really need to concentrate on actually taking decent photos to start with. I'm trying to work on composition and interesting angels at the moment. I'm also experimenting with some interesting effects on the post processing side. I'm especially loving photos with high brightness, contrast and vibrancy such as this one below. Now I now it has its faults but its the *style* I'm trying to demonstrate.

Hey up lass. Didn't this used to be Louise's blog?

Ah well you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd stumbled onto the wrong page but it really is me. I'm just in disguise. I have reorganised the blog because I'l like to use it to record and log improvements and such of my photography skills. So I guess you could call it a photo blog then :)