Please Give Honest Opinion

Hello everyone!

It is great to be a member here and a proud owner of a Canon DSLR! I have 4 of my better pictures IMHO that I would like for the experts here to critique. I have only had my camera for 2 weeks so I am still learning the ropes I have taken over 4000 photos so far with my Canon Rebel T2i. I have been doing A LOT of reading and practicing, and I love photography! It is my new hobby and maybe possibly more than that down the road.

So, here are 4 photos that I would like you all to critique. They were taken in RAW format and slightly altered with DPP 3.8 and then a little in Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3. They were not altered greatly. These were taken with the kit lens. I will be purchasing the 24-105 f4 lens this week and a couple more L series lenses over the next few weeks.


Bee
f/5.6
1/1000
ISO-400
55mm

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None of the images are visible to me.

imahawki wrote in post #10727991
None of the images are visible to me.

Sorry about that. I fixed them

All of them are quite good. I actually really like the worm. The only thing with the ocean is you always want to avoid having the horizon cut the image directly in half. That's about it... how did you get #1 to be so "creamy". Its sharp yet, as I said, creamy. Nice image.

Welcome to the forum.
I'm no expert, but I will give you my 2 cents worth,
#1 be it birds or bees, bum shots don't work for me, they have eyes and I would like to see them!
also if the subject doesn't at the very least fill a third of the frame I don't fire.

#2 Nice colors but IMHO would be better if you cropped just above the sun, theres nothing interesting there, and it would put the horizon on thirds. (google "the rule of thirds')
Nice composition on the orchid,the diagonal makes a strong statment, but I would have removed the plastic bamboo support and the rim of the pot.
I really like the worm shot, may have been better if it was a little off center.

keep shooting,,,and keep posting!

I really like the worm shot!
As posted above the bee would have rocked if it was flying toward you and we could see its eyes, but just a clean in flight capture is something to be proud of if you are just starting out. I also agree on the crop suggested above for the ocean shot. Your orchid shot was well executed in terms of exposure and focus, however the comp doesn't work for me, I would crop to vertical to remove the extraneous elements.

all in all you are off to a great start, keep reading and experimenting and above all have fun!

I appreciate all the input!!!

@ imahawki
I don't know exactly what I did to give it that look. I can tell you there was a lot of tinkering around to get the green and yellow to look right. I did do some unmask sharpening too.


I listened and am bringing 2 revisions to the table and a new shot of the bee with some "eyes"

REVISED OCEAN

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Bingo! much better,
Aaron, +1 on CalebG,s comments,, if your not having fun it will show in your shots!
Superb line up of glass your proposing, we're all very good at spending other peoples money here , so let me start,, you need to get a tripod, a polarizing filter and a remote shutter release.

NEW BEE (newbie)

Aaron if you want to enable "image editing ok" we can give you a visual of our suggestions.

jack lumber wrote in post #10728641
NEW BEE (newbie)

lol

Thanks for the suggestions! I'm an extremely quick learner though so the newb title will only apply for a short period of time

The worm is my favorite. The composition of the first bee shot is also interesting, but as someone already pointed out I don't like that it's flying away.

I am less excited about the flower and sunset photos, but that's not because there's something wrong with them, it's just that there are a zillion of those floating around.

I must say you're off to a nice start. At a rate of 4000 shots in a week you must be learning a lot and getting pretty comfortable with how the camera works. That's what I love about digital and what got me interested in photography – there's no film to buy and no developing costs, so once you have your gear there's no cost difference between practicing a little or a lot.

1) I like the overall feel of the photo but I don't feel like the bee is the subject of it. Generally if you have a photo where most of it is out of focus and one part is in focus then the bit that's in focus is the subject. The flower on the right looks to be in focus to me, but not the bee. It's quite hard to get decent photos of bees at the best of times (even harder when they're flying!), especially with the kit lens. A good effort, just slightly wide of the mark.

2) The thing that baffles me with this shot is your choice of settings:

Ocean
f/29
1/100
ISO-800
35mm

There's no point stepping your lens down to f/29 - you will encounter something known as diffraction at this setting, which basically makes your photo look softer. Also, because it's stepped down so far you had to raise your ISO to 800, which introduces noise, but more importantly lowers the dynamic range of the image... and with sunsets you need as much information from your camera's sensor as possible. Next time leave your camera at ISO 100 and choose an aperture of, say, f/11.

Also there's no a great deal to look at in the photo - see if you can get something else in the shot that's interesting.

3) Pretty good but it doesn't do much for me I'm afraid. Try from a different angle, maybe slightly higher looking down, and so on. Again, you might want to have another go at this once you get a new lens.

4) This one's nice. The worm's head (I think!) is perfectly in focus and the rest of his body blurs away nicely. Best of the bunch I reckon.

Holy crap, I was looking through the list of new lenses you are going to purchase in the next two months, did you win the lottery or somethin? only thing missing from the list I would love to have is the 5dmkII.
BTW the new bee is much better, you may want to add some extension tubes to your list as well for closeup work until you get the macro. The orchid looks much nicer now, the sunset is better as well but really needs some foreground interest, next time find yourself some flowers or a big chunk of gnarly driftwood to put in the bottom of the frame. Keep firing that Canon!