Critters and Flowers

[Jorrit Visser]

I recently bought a Olympus SP-590 UZ secondhand to start my first serious venture into photography, and after a few days, these are my first results harvested. Since I'm just beginning, tips about composition, colors, really anything, are most welcome. Most of these pics were either shot in P-mode, Super Macro, or with Aperture Priority mode and zooming in (it is a 26x zoom model after all ).


Belligerent Buzzer by Jorrit Visser, on Flickr

[RichardTaylor]

You may want to have a look at the critique forum rules.

http://digital-photography-school.co...rum-rules.html


With the "bug" shot's try to get in close and fill the frame as much as possible.
If you can't get close when shooting then try to fill a large part of the frame by cropping when post processing.

When shooting, and cropping keep in mind things like the rule (it's a guideline) of thirds.
See this post on DPS
Rule of Thirds

Also when shooting try to have a "clean" background. You may need to change your shooting position to remove a lot of distracting elements from your photograph.

[chicagojohn]

Originally Posted by Jorrit Visser

I recently bought a Olympus SP-590 UZ secondhand to start my first serious venture into photography, and after a few days, these are my first results harvested. Since I'm just beginning, tips about composition, colors, really anything, are most welcome. Most of these pics were either shot in P-mode, Super Macro, or with Aperture Priority mode and zooming in (it is a 26x zoom model after all ).

Not bad for a first attempt, Jorrit Visser! I admire your grit for getting this close to a bee

I'm not familiar with your camera, but you should have access to EXIF data (Exchangable Image File Format) which will tell you the essential parameter values at which your image was captured; at a minimum, aperture (f/number), shutter speed, and ISO sensitivity; along, perhaps with lens, focal length, etc.

These data are often useful in the critique section in allowing others to make meaningful suggestions as to how you might have changed what you did to achieve an image the viewer may consider to be better. See if you can find access to this information and if you can finde it, suppy it in future posts, which we certainly hope you make.

Now as to this image, I personally like it because the fly appears to be in very sharp focus pretty much in its entirety in contrast to virtually everything else which is slightly ablur. That heightens the viewers' focus upon the subject.

Moreover, the bee is not centered; it is off center, and that adds to the visual interest. In this case, your placement does not follow the rule-of-thirds exactly, but it does tend to follow a purer form, of which the rule-of-thirds is but a very rough approximation, called the fibonnaci ratio. That is a visual principle used by great artists like Leonardo da Vinci, and in many structural designs in nature.

Finally, hue (color) is yet another way you have made your subject stand out against everything else; the bee is more on the red-brown side, which is the complementary (opposite) hue versus green which is the predominant background.

I like it overall. Next time look into whether you can tell us an f/number, shutter speed, and ISO sensitivity. These might appear as f/8.0, 1/60 sec, and ISO 200, for example. I tried to examine a copy of your photo and that info didn't come through.

Thanks for posting on DPS, and we hope to see more of your work.