Bench along the path

[danic]

I'm not too sure if there is enough contrast between the seat and the path. What do you think?

[95PGTTech]

I love pictures like this that keep the subject in the foreground focused and blur the background. In this case though, you lose the focus a bit at the back of the bench, your subject. And it tapers off a bit too much in the distance. I would like to see a bit more of the end of the bench and more of the path focused because you're using that as a secondary subject, it gets almost too blurry back there.

I like the format and the grayscale though, plays well together. The picture is busy enough and has enough going on without being too busy or distracting.

[GB1]

Has a real artsy feeling to it Danic. But I think it would be ideal if there was snow on that bench and fence. Seeing how you live in Australia I guess that doesn't happen all that often though. I think there's sufficient contrast. The low DOF is a strenght but wonder if there should be just a little more?

G

[danic]

Thanks for your comments 95PGTTech and GB1.

95PGTTech: I made the corner of the bench my focal point and let the DOF trail back through the photo. Ideally I would have liked the bench in focus, but it would be hard to keep it in focus and get the background blurry.

GB1: I wasn't trying to be artsy, I merely try to look at the world from a different view and then capture it. I try and take photo's of subjects that others would normally pass by.

I have one more to critique and then I'm done.

[95PGTTech]

I'm having the same issue as you with the focus in this shot. If you look at the front of the Cobra, you can see the focus trailing off.

That was shot with a 3S IS on full auto mode, I'm hoping that with the new gear I can manually set the focus out a bit. If you do figure it out, please let me know how you did it because a lot of my composition is from the type of angle I used.

[Grandpaw]

Danic, don't take this personally but I think there is just too much out of focus and you loose the back end of the bench do to low contrast between the bench and pier. More DOF and contrast would improve this alot. As they say, just my 2 cents worth, Jeff

[Frog]

Ditto for me....dof is too shallow but what you were trying is good.
Try decreasing your aperture in steps until you get the depth you want.

[danic]

Thanks for your feedback Grandpaw and Frog. I would have loved more contrast between the bench and the path, but oh well.

Don't worry Grandpaw, I don't take it personally Otherwise I would never post photo's to critique!


95PGTTech: To blur the background, other than in Photoshop, you adjust your aperture. For this shot, I'm reasonably sure I used f8, as this is around the sweet spot of my lens. In hindsight, I should have used maybe f5.6 of f4. I've attached a link to Luminous Landscape which explains DOF. Hope this helps you out!
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tu...ries/dof.shtml

[Frog]

f/5.6 or f/4 will give you less dof. This does not look like an f/8 to me but maybe because of how close you were to the focal point.
Looks like the light may not have been good enough for handheld at higher f stop but I've learned here that its frequently best to focus 1/3 of the way into the scene.
Its just so nicely composed I'm hoping you can get it better if you can access the site again.

[danic]

Of course, you're right Frog. What I meant was around f11 or f16. Although f16 gives a lot of DOF, maybe too much. Yeah, it was shot using a tripod as there was not a lot of light about. Maybe one day I'll go back and try again