A day at the races

These photos were takne yesterday at Newmarket races, they were taken on a 350D with 100-400mm lens...I'm hoping to use some of them for my City and Guilds level 2 photography portfolio......please feel free to comment on them as I am still very much on a learning curve! They were both canid shots, the first was a lucky moment which I caught and the second is the Jockey explaining to the trainer what went wrong LOL.....
Thanks

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Dawn:

These two photos are both technically well done (exposure, focus and lighting), the main subjects are well isolated and apart from the backgrounds.

The second one is just.... well, ordinary.

It does not impart any special feeling to me and without the story line that you have given, it is just another picture that shows the technical abilities of the equipment and photographer.

The first one, however, is supurb!

Timing and luck are often everything and this one has both!

It has all the components of the technical side, exposure/lighting etc. but..... oh the emotion!

It reaches out and grabs you. It needs no title or explanation. Although it will speak to each one of us differently to me it says Young Love.

In fact it evoked that feeling and also the rememberance of the song by Sonny James. I'm not sure that you have heard of this song (here is a link to his site and a link to the audio clip of the song), you need to be somewhat in the 50ish age bracket.

http://www.sonnyjames.​com/

the song is about halfway down the page if your interested.

The only thing that I would change in this picture is to try cropping the background people either side of the young couple. I find the bright pinks to be distracting.

Sorry for the long post,

thanks for sharing.

John thank you so much for that...I love this site....I'm doing a City and Guilds photography course and we are only allowed to use Manual...I've only been doing this for about 6 weeks........I feel exactly as you do..I love the my first photo...the other one is right but it doesn't tell you whats going on....although I'm pleased to have got the exposure and stuff right....I'd have liked them to have more expression....I have a photo of 2 race horse trainers that were engrosed in a conversation which was obviously hilarious, then a photographer got in on the act and had his camera more or less in their face which caused more hilarity and this has much more feeling about it....but the photo is more cluttered in that I was on the other side of the track and the picture has the running rails in it ...have a look I'd like to hear your opinion of this one...

Thanks..

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Dawn:

This is a better picture than the first one with the jockey, but still not on par with the young couple.

For someone who does not know either of the people I think that it would be very hard to evoke the same type of response as the couple. Obviously the two men are amused at something but the photograph does not let us know what it is. If it was something that they were talking about then we could never know.

It is very difficult to try and examine the photograph as it is very small so details do not come through very well.

Can you get a post with the image at 800 x 600?

It does appear to be well taken (in a technical sense), and to those who are familiar with the people in the picture it would probably work very well. It is obviously backlit and there is some overexposure on the head of the man on the left (almost impossible not to overexpose in this instance). It does not detract and the faces are nicely visible.

The rail does indeed detract but you could probably crop this out during post processing.

I have tons of pictures that I have taken that I thought were super but after I got home and re-evaluated could not get the same feeling. :<(

Basic and extreme emotions are easier to capture in people. Often people will put captions on their photographs to steer others towards the feeling that the photographer was trying to evoke.

So, it is a good picture, just not a great photograph.

Thanks John...its great to get constructive feedback .............. I'll try to post a bit larger so you cna see them better....
I looked at the link to the song.......it does fit the photo of the couple very well....
Do you have a gallery or a blog with any of your photos I could look at....its really good to see other peoples work.....
I'm looking for some books or web sites about equine photography as part of my portfolio I need to get some horse shots and would like to do something a little more creative..........