Reply To: here

[stef]

If you don’t try to sell your pictures, it’s a lot harder to bash you for being a fauxtographer. Some of your event shots were okay, and concerts and such are difficult enough to shoot and get position if you don’t have a guaranteed press spot that you get a pass on those.

 

So I checked your portraits album, and you need a lot of practice posing people. The album with Kimberly Dawn was sub-par mostly due to poor posing and poor composition. The first dozen shots are primarily watermarked nostrils and armpits. The thing is, even with a couple good shots in there, I can’t get past your watermark. For instance, is this shot too close and heavily distorting her nose, or is it just the watermark making her nose stick out? http://t3heavyshop.smugmug.com/Portraits/Kimberly-Dawn/i-QWzd7DN/1/M/IMG2117-M.jpg Unwatermarked, that looks like a good shot. A 2/3 mask with butterfly lighting is very becoming on that girl. Even the tonality looks good. But I can’t be sure because it’s too distracting.

 

A better idea is to use a less obtrusive watermark and just limit the filesize that can be viewed. There’s no reason anyone would want a 5000 pixel wide image with a huge watermark anyway, so why make that available? Another way is to use a watermark that has no obvious curves, unlike letters. The brain can filter out lines that cut across it, and it’ll only be as annoying as a telephone wire.

 

I liked some of your landscapes, but it was hit or miss, again due to composition. For the most part, you need to learn to actively look at the image and consciously think “where is my eye drawn with this composition?” It’s clear you’re starting to think about composition, and I urge you to actually get a book on it. Many used bookstores carry old college photography textbooks, and you could really use a beginning one right about now before you start going down the dark paths of HDR and florabella. Right now, your photography has a basic honesty to it, but it’s missing good composition.

One of your compositions was pretty good, and even more notable because it also ignored the “rule of thirds”. http://t3heavyshop.smugmug.com/Nature/Garden-of-the-Gods/i-4Z6jKj3/1/M/IMG0750-M.jpg

 

If you were charging for this, then I’d vote fauxtographer. But since you’re just doing it for fun, then I think you should keep on having fun and get a book, and when someone asks you to shoot a wedding, tell them “No, please hire a pro.”