:D advice?

[giorgiak]

Hi everyone, I'm new here and I'm still getting used to how this place works. I'll start here by showing you a photo of mine, part of a thread of photos concerning local handcrafted products. I'm not a professional photographer but it is a hobby of mine. This one made me proud, so please tell me how I could better myself
http://www.flickr.com/photos/giorgia-k/441720316/

[thekevinmonster]

warning: I am totally an amateur

I think the first thing that's noticeable is that you have the subject (the uhm, cello? unless it's a viola and it just looks big), *and* the workshop used to create the subject, in the same shot. That gives some cause and effect... but the workshop is hiding in the shadow.

To solve that in post production, I suppose you could crop out the workshop parts of the picture, leaving just the instrument.

To solve it when taking the picture, I'd go up for a close shot of the instrument with the workshop in the background, with shallow depth of field (large aperture). Not so shallow that the workshop area is just fuzz, but shallow enough that it is out of focus and drawing attention to the instrument. If you keep it at the right uh, fuzziness, it'd be obvious that it was a workshop and not some other random area.

Another issue is that the left side of the photo is very light, and the right side is very dark. I have no idea why that is (sunlight coming in from over the photographer's shoulder? left-mounted camera flash?) but it leaves the shot somewhat unbalanced. Moving to the right and forward would rotate the photographer so the lighting was more even across both sides of the image.

There are my thoughts...

[giorgiak]

thanks for the advice. i shot the photo at night, actually. no flash, just my arms trying to stay as still as possible. i have a few others of the same store where i zoom in a little on the violin but i didn't like them cos they weren't informative enough ...
as for the contrast between the left and right side, i'll try to keep that in mind next time thanks!

[wulf]

Do you have a larger original than the 500x375 version on Flickr? If so, then you could try cropping it down a bit to make the violin larger in the frame while still keeping some of the context. In particular, I find the guitar head in the bottom left distracting but I think that could be cropped out for a better final result.

Also, don't feel you have to try and capture the whole essence of a place in one shot. Sometimes it is better to do a series of pictures that each have a clear subject in focus but between them tell the story of the place.

Wulf