Photoagg:
Thanks for sharing some of your pictures. I like the "photojournalist" approach you took of shooting events and people involved in something that, as a photographer, you're trying to communicate to people who were not there. I've shot a ton of events like that over the past decade and I've learned a few tricks that maybe you can try next time to go from "not the best pictures ever" to "darn good pictures".
1. Subject: subjects are everything in photojournalistic pictures ("PP"). The subjects' face, body language, attitude is 80% of the quality of the final product. Many famous PP were not technically perfect or even composition wise perfect, but the subject conveyed such pain, joy, anger, distress, etc. that the picture was fantastically compeling. The subject in your pictures do not really convey intense feelings and it's even hard to know what the event was all about. This may be either that you didn't select the right subject, or (more likely in this case) that there really wasn't much to convey. In either case, always keep you eyes open and consider PP no different from action photography. An expression on a face may last 5 seconds, you gotta shoot it right there, right now or it will be gone.
2. Composition: composition is the second most important thing in PP. The choice to shoot portrait or landscape, who to include or exclude from the picture to best convey the message. I don't know if you are using a zoom or a prime lens, I'd recommend a zoom and play with the composition. In some of your pictures (the flag for example), you could have achieved a better result by shooting horizontal instead of vertical and not include the flag in the picture but just the pole. You could have used (for example) a zoom at 200mm and play with depth of field to have the pole in focus and the people not in focus (or use slow sync. with tipod to have "movement" of the people--i.e., motion blur and perfect sharp focus of the non moving pole). Experiment more with composition and you'll see great improvement.
3. Colors/Contrast: This may be my computer screen (a laptop) but colors appear dull and contrasts are lacking. Did you process the pictures in Photoshop? Also the dynamic range of the levels seems limited.
Summary: keep shooting and learn to develop an eye for what to shoot. Hope that helps.
Cheers,
Philippe
