Yarkon Nature Park Photos

[The Grim Squeaker]

Photos from the Yarkon park, a large park inside Tel-Aviv. I wandered there with company on Saturday.

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a quickr pickr post
Yes, I know, dust on the sensor . (And some of the photos aren't showing up for some reason, maybe they'll work tomorrow...)

[JointStrikeFighter]

So is the girl in 0378 the company?

[The Grim Squeaker]

So is the girl in 0378 the company?

1/3 of it

[Simplicius]

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I find the blur at the top-left of the frond distracting and off-putting - it looks almost like a motion blur at a low shutter speed - and the snail is too hidden and too small to work as the subject here. You don't need macro to photograph small critters, but you do want an extreme close-up and for the creature's head to be visible - top-down, or facing the camera to some degree. Think of it as a portrait, and check out a variety of angles and compose - with snails, there is no need to rush.

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This photo lacks a sense of depth; all the branches appear equidistant from the camera and there is nothing in front of or behind them, so the usual tricks of shallow depth of field, shadow, or perspective are useless. Composition is really weak; you have that diagonal so it's not just a snapshot of dead tree limbs, but even that simple composition doesn't really do anything for the picture because there isn't really anything in the picture. Choice of subject is poor, for two reasons: 1) tree branches in general are boring, and 2) photos of mundane objects from ordinary perspective (i.e. 5-6 feet above ground) are boring. Trees aren't automatically bad subjects, but you have to find the right perspective.

The key to taking really interesting photos of anything is uniqueness. Either the subject (or the 'moment') has to be unique, or the perspective has to be unique. It can be a view from much taller than the ordinary adult human perspective, or far shorter; a narrower or a wider field of vision, or an unusual angle; closer or farther away than people usually look at things, or in wavelengths or timeframes that human vision doesn't perceive. If you want your photos to grab a viewer's attention, they have to show something that people don't see every day.

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This photo is not especially interesting. Part of that is the plant - since the part that the viewer is paying attention to is pretty much just white, it really needs good lighting so it doesn't just look like a white blob on top of green leaves. You can see how the leaves in the white section are only lightly set off from each other by any kind of shadow, but in a monotone bit like that, shadow is what will add visual interest.

Also, it's colored to resemble a very pale breast. B.O.M.B., you guys wanna take a look at this?

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For starters, it's a pity the girl is swallowed up by the busy background. Her leap was well-caught, but she doesn't stand out in the picture because her dark clothes blend into the dark areas right behind her, while her legs are lost in the diagonals right behind them. This is also a "normal perspective" shot, which doesn't help it any.

Shots like this are hard to catch in the wild; they work much better posed, so for this one to be a dud is nothing to be ashamed about. If you were to take a friend and pose this one, I would try these things:

1. A lower, closer perspective. Silhouette the jumper against the sky to get that problematic background out of the way, and closer so he'll dominate more of the frame.
2. A shallower depth of field. You could use this to set the jumper apart from the background, if nothing else.
3. Different times of day. The whole of this play area is in shadow, so the light is not direct and thus the lighting is flat, which doesn't work for this shot. If you were posing it, you could set up the shot in advance, knowing where the sun would be and thus what different directions and kind of light you could work with.

Now, maybe it would be a pain in the ass to actually do that, but these are some of the things (especially the direction and feel of the ambient lighting) you need to keep in mind as you shoot. I've had potentially decent photos suddenly become not worth taking because the sun went behind a cloud, or it was too bright, or too low, or whatever. Lighting is important, even if you only use what nature provides.

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This is a decent picture of the child, and this is also another picture where the position of the sun in the sky was working against you. You couldn't have changed it, but it doesn't help that the bright areas are all away from the boy's face, and indeed most of the boy.

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More really flat lighting here, but the composition isn't bad because of the opposing curves of the two people, while what they are sitting on is made of straight lines. I think you should have framed it just a bit lower and to the left, for less tree in the upper right and so you didn't cut off the very outside edge of the girl. Cutting off extremities is a common framing mistake in snaps, but it's an easily fixable one.

Decent snap; could have been better still if you had been able to use godlike powers to make the sun shine so your friends were better-lit than the background.

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This one is good. I don't know if I'd have framed it just a hair to the left, but the detail in color in the duck's face holds the eye there very well, even though its breast is a very white white; had it been just a little brighter it would have undone the photo. Good choice of aperture as well - the background is very obviously there but does not draw attention, and the dark grey balances the bright duck well.

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The idea is basically good - photos of the moon rising over hills, or buildings, or what-have-you seem to be popular - but I think the dead tree branches aren't much good here, because 1) they are just dead tree branches, and 2) they just run straight across the bottom of the frame. If you wanted to try a shot like this in the future you could try framing the moon with some branches, and give more of your frame to the moon (if you've got a long enough tele). This won't make it a terribly good photo, but it will probably be the best you can do with this particular moon + Earthly object pairing.

I like the wisp of cloud, though. A bit of luck there.

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This one suffers from the same kinds of things your other tree pictures here do, but it also illustrates a bad compositional choice. When I first look at it, my eyes fall on all the branches up top, because they make a big dark area. They then follows the two trunks down, down, to...the very bottom of the frame, where they slip right off the picture because there isn't anything for them to land on. This is what I mean when I talk about leading lines, and why you should use them as a way to guide the viewer's eye as he looks at your photos - to look toward a subject, or to follow the path of a story, or to take in a scene. Sometimes leading lines are very subtle: if you show someone in the photo looking in a particular direction, the viewer will look to see what they are looking at.

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This one is a decent snap, but not much else. Would have been better had the mallards been facing in the opposite direction or toward the camera, since right now the brightest, best-lit parts are their arses.

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This is more like what I was getting at with the first snail picture - the snail is prominent in the frame, both because the shell stands out from the green and because the DoF sets him in the foreground, but also because the snail is clearly visible and clearly a snail. A mite closer would have been good, if possible, but the snail is well-placed in the frame too, so he doesn't get lost even though he is small.

This one doesn't look bad rotated 90 degrees clockwise, either.

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I don't know what perspectives you explored when you took this one, but if there was one that shifted the power lines downward so they weren't in direct competition with the sculpture-thing, you should have used it - they are very distracting. Good job with the silhouette, though, and nice try at involving the sun in the composition instead of just letting it hang out. Best you probably could have done would be letting it shine through the bird's eyehole, but the glowy hat is okay too.

Since the sculpture is for all purposes flat when in shadow like this, you could have used a wider aperture and faster shutter to minimize the importance of the clutter in the background while keeping the sculpture in silhouette.

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The frame is really empty, but the power lines are spaced such that they technically fill it; the uneven spacing of the line groups and the spacers make the eye skip all over the place. This photo is really difficult to look at, and I think it's kind of neat that it's so hard to look at when there's so little in it. So that's my verdict: 'neat.'

Heh, as a musician I instinctively look for notation when I see fine black lines grouped like that.

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I think there are two main approaches to automotive photography (which also apply to marine, rail, and architectural photography). One is to take a portrait of the automobile - stationary or mobile, in a variety of enviroments, but a shot that shows all that is visible of the vehicle from whatever angle it's looked at, and so is a photo of the whole thing. The other is to get real close and isolate one feature of the automobile's design, and turn the thing into a piece of abstract art. This photo is too close to be one and too far away to be the other, so you just have a photo of part of a motorbike, which doesn't really work.

The way this is lit, though, I could totally see this as an advertisement if it were a photo of the whole bike, and the whole thing was lit in the same way.

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This one is kind of boring because, first of all, the mushrooms are lost in the ground, which is basically the same color as them, and second, because you aren't close enough to them to make the viewer pay attention to them. You just say "Oh hey look, here are some mushrooms," and the viewer looks and says "Oh, okay," and that's about it. Needs to be much closer to the subject, needs a wider aperture, and really needs some better lighting.

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Good lighting angle and use of aperture to give depth and visual interest here, though you probably should have closed the apterture one stop or less, or focused a bit closer - just enough to get the front of the post in focus in addition to part of the top. Not getting the entirety of the top in focus was the right thing to do, however.

The photo itself is meh because of the limitations of the subject, but you did the right things with it.

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If those are like giant floating watertight hamster balls, how do the people get inside?

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I have the same thing to say about this one as about IMG_0271.

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Pretty, and it's got a bit of sidelight there which is good, but I think it is just a bit overexposed, for one, and flower shots generally aren't much good anyway unless they are really close, really far away (i.e. a whole field full of flowers), or done as a studio still-life.

Yes, I know, dust on the sensor . (And some of the photos aren't showing up for some reason, maybe they'll work tomorrow...)

I bet you could get one of those rubber bulb blowers cheaply. Start with that for a safe DIY cleaning and see if it works.

Also, thanks for resizing. It was much easier to look at them at this size.