Did you venture outside New Hampshire while you were in the Northeast?
Now that you've seen all that, here's a little secret. (Just about) Every single picture was taken with a poncy little 3 year old compact camera. Does it show?.
Another little secret is that more often than not, its the photographer rather than the equipment that counts. It's quite possible to take good pictures with a compact if you avoid or can work around the limits of the instrument. The benefit of more advanced cameras is merely that fewer limits are imposed on the user.
You too have too many photos to possibly comment on all of them individually, so I will only pick out the few I think are best. You've improved since your older pictures so I won't say anything about them, besides which it wouldn't exactly be fair as my home turf is located in New England so I am somewhat jaded when it comes to people from away and the things they take pictures of.
The photo of the ice looks good, though you might want to look at cropping it a bit - the sea ice in the foreground becomes a bit redundant, while the bit of rock outcrop on the left tends to draw the eye out of the frame. Try a crop from the left that covers just the width of that rock, and then up from the bottom to bring it somewhere in the neighborhood of 3:4. That will tidy the image up, though it won't address its main weakness, which I will get to as a general comment.
The one of people climbing up the slot canyon is another potentially good one, though it suffers from the blown sky at the top of the canyon. Cropping all but the bottom of that works but makes the canyon walls seem shorter, so the best solution might have been a composite exposure. If you had taken a second shot metered for the sky, and then carefully Photoshopped that sky in, it might have fixed it. Also, as a matter of perspective, a wider-angle lens would have let you stand closer to the hikers at bottom right without reducing your view of the canyon, which points toward the general comment once again.
A note: Using Photoshop sounds like a dirty trick, but photographers have been compositing, dodging, burning, pushing, and cross-processing before us whippersnappers with digital cameras and computers ever existed. Most photographs could stand a at least a little post-processing; it's the chumps who go nuts with filters, vignetting, oversaturation (or desaturation), and OMG TRUE HDR who give Photoshop a bad name. If you don't have Photoshop, dig out Gimp or Paint.net and see how subtly you can use it. It will come in handy, and it's not really cheating - a bad photo is a bad photo, but an almost-good photo could become a keeper if you post-process intelligently.
The one of the three rock spires would probably have been better in portrait format. As it stands now, half of the photo is dead space, and you miss out on the built-in rule of thirds. The topography itself is good, but the photo is compositionally quite weak.
The photo of the squadron of seagulls lifting off is probably one of the stronger 'scene' photos here, in that you have a scene but also something in the foreground for the eye to track in on. But more about that later.
The two guys fishing - you probably didn't mean to cut off the taller one's feet, right? It's usually a good idea to include the ends of extremities in the frame if most of the extremity is already in (this goes for arms, legs, head).
Best monkey shot is the one with the adult and juvenile on the tree branch, except for the blown sky and missing tail tip. It also looks like you've got a bit of blue on the edge of the branch in the upper right, probably because of the difference in brightness between the light and shaded areas. I don't know what you could have done to prevent that at the time; sometimes it is unavoidable.
"Old School Turkey" would have been better had the Zodiac been closer to the camera and to the center of the frame; as it is, there's a lot of dead space and background without foreground.
Now for the general comments, of which there are two. 1.) When shooting a single obvious subject - a flower (or few), a bird, an airplane, a person, etc. - do all you can to fill the frame with that subject. Get as close as your lens permits, or crop tightly if you can't get close, but that subject should absolutely dominate the image. Unless the background provides some context - as a workbench in a photo of a carpenter might - it should be minimized, as it is dead space that isolates the subject from the viewer. If some background is necessary for context, you should still direct the viewer's attention to the subject of your photo via framing, lighting, and depth of field.
2.) When shooting a scene, rather than a subject, be mindful of where the viewer's eyes will be directed when he looks at your photo. You aren't just presenting a flat image - "Here is this mountain; isn't it majestic" - "Behold this tree" - "Lo! How a rose e'er blooming"
- but a compressed representation of three-dimensional space. Instead of giving the viewer something to look
at, give him something to look
into. This requires that you have a foreground, a middle ground, and a background even in a landscape. And while you are thinking about where the viewer's eye will go, try to compose the shot so that it is naturally led toward the most important part of the photo (this goes for subject-oriented photos as well). For this, study up on leading lines and broaden your compositional horizons.
You've improved, but you've still a ways to go. I'd say you're edging into garden catalogue and desktop background territory, with the occasional glimmer of further progress.
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- PeZook
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. Never saw it that way, interesting to hear that perspective.
