My trip to Arizona (my first official post)

shelly77

Alright, well. I wanted to post some photos I took down in Arizona. I haven't retouched any of them yet, but I'd absolutely love feedback. I'm really proficient in photoshop, but I'm trying to develop my eye for pure photography. I realize many of them could use adjustments, but I wanted to see what you thought with just my pure pictures.

















Any feedback, positive or negative is appreciated.

shelly77

Anybody? Anybody?

Please, be brutally honest. I can take anything you have to say.

nicoleshilliday

As you said these do need some work. I am attracted to the first and last shot but the others just don't do anything for me. The colors of AZ are amazing and i do not feel that these capture the true beauty of the sate.

With that said, keep posting. I am very very green when it comes to all of this and think this is a great place to learn.

Dee

I applaud you for wanting to get your images right in the camera instead of relying on post processing. I'm not sure what camera you are using. When I was using a non-dslr camera I actually got or could get pretty decent color. After switching to my dslr I found that getting images to work in-camera was a little harder and they required post processing work.

Unfortunately your photos have an extreme dynamic range from shadows to sky. I think the light was not in your favor either.

If your camera has manual adjustments, you can play with the settings to try to get what you want. I will use a minus or plus EV if I'm shooting jpg, or will try the auto bracket feature of my camera to try to get a good balance when shooting under those lighting conditions.

Usually though the only thing I can do is shoot for the shadows, then shoot for the sky, using a tripod, and use photoshop to blend the two images.

Under rare (for me, ) conditions when the light is just right I can get a lot closer to getting the image right in camera.

I'm sure some photographers can get it right but I have to really work at it.

shelly77

These pictures are really interesting to me, as I wasn't trying to take masterpieces at the time. These pictures are about two years old and were taken with my crappy digital at the time. The tough thing about that area for me was the light. Most of those pictures were taken either in the early morning before the sun was fully out, or in mid day when the light was very intense. The pictures looking at the river in the ravine are really interesting to me, but it is really difficult cleaning them up in photoshop for some reason.

Thanks for the feed back. I probably shouldn't have posted my less appealing pictures as my first post, but believe me when I say I have loads more to show.

Dee

You can probably salvage these photos in photoshop. I have photos that mean a lot to me too but need to be post processed. It's worth it to do the best you can with them :-)

ian408

Welcome Shelly!

I'm going to move these over to Field & Stream just so they get some more airplay.

Ian