Our online class is over. What’s going to keep me honest in my pursuit of learning photography?

Hopefully this blog.

Here is a portion of an email I just received from our photo teacher:

It’s been a wonderful ride, being with you the past two months. I’ve

created an online gallery of your work which you can see here:

<http://www.photoexplorations.com/Gallery052008/HTML/index.htm>

Your work looks good. And I think you’re going to be amazed at how

professional your photos look in the gallery.

If you visit this gallery, and you click on a photo the student’s name appears in the URL.

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1 CRITIQUE: Linda Jeffers

Walk Around the Block

COURSE LAKE VIEW



For a photo in which it appears

you did a lot of things “wrong,”

this looks pretty good!

The lighting is bright and sunny,

which is not surprising for the

desert, but it appears early/late

enough in the day that it’s not

overwhelmingly bright. There are

long shadows that make things

interesting rather than having the

sun straight up, creating a

shadow-free zone.

The horizon line is centered, dividing your picture in half. Normally this isn’t the best choice for

us, since putting the horizon line dead center tends to create a static composition, where our

eyes go right to the center of the frame and aren’t encouraged to go elsewhere. What you did to

create a composition with movement to it (versus a static composition) was put the willow tree

off to the far right, have it close, and have it create a sort of frame through which we look at the

scene. So yes, our eye goes to the middle of the photo (where the light-colored building can be

seen off in the distance), but then the tree moves our eye over toward the right; the overhanging

branches then encourage our eye upward and over toward the left, as does the water in the pond.

What also creates interest and movement in your photo are the reflections of the tall palm trees

in the water. Without those trees, we’d have just a blank expanse of water. The shadows create

up-down movement as well as texture. The only thing that’s definitely not working for you is

that green wooden stick coming up from the bottom of the frame. If you were to make a print of

this photo, I’d definitely clone it (and its reflection) out of the shot.

You created a very good shot despite challenging lighting. Well done.

2. LADY BACKLIT



You come close to greatness with this picture. First of all, let me commend you for spotting it to

begin with. And then let me commend you for exposing it as beautifully as you did. What’s killing it is the land/rock in the lower

right corner. Heavy sigh. The rest of

your photo is fantastic. Here’s why.

Moody, dramatic lighting. The dark

sculpture, the dark trees reflected in the

water, the deep blue of the water, the

golden glow in the upper right corner,

and the way the sculpture is sidelighted

— absolutely wonderful.

The earring. The way you seem to have

metered off the brightly colored earring

is great. As a result, it’s properly

exposed while everything else goes

dark. And that’s the perfect effect for

this picture. The way the earring echoes

the golden tones upper right is superb.

Without the earring, your photo would

still be good. But WITH the earring, it’s

cranked up a notch and becomes quite

mysterious and artistic.

The complementary colors of blue and

orange create a lot of drama.

And finally the angles of the sculpture as it swings into the photo create lots of movement and

encourage our eye to move along with those angles, running on a diagonal from lower left to

upper right. Wonderful.

If only there had been more blue water where that bit of land is on the right. Not only would

your sculpture stand out even more than it does, but it would simplify your photo considerably,

thereby creating more drama and tying everything together. The land blocks up the picture and

interrupts the feeling of movement. Alas.

Still, you handled the shooting challenges incredibly well and composed the photo perhaps as

well as you could given what you had to work with. It’s easy for me to say “lose the land” when

I wasn’t there to see what you had to deal with. In a perfect world there’d be nothing but

glorious water and reflections behind this sculpture. Ah well. You should still be pleased.

3 SPRINKLER RAINBOW (I lost this photo when my computer crashed. It wasn’t great anyway. Imagine a shot from the condo looking at the sprinklers watering the grass of the 15th fairway creating a rainbow in the water from the early morning sun hitting the water. Beyond the fairway is the lake, then far away condos that Carol refers to in her critique, then palm trees and San Jacinto.)

It’s these little miracles of light that, to me, make photography so

rewarding at times. Your rainbow is very pretty and I like the overall

scene. Your greens are good, the water’s a good color blue, and I like

the strong shadows you’ve got in among the trees as well as stretching

across the green in front of us.

What’s not working for you are

the brightly lighted houses and

mountains across the way. When

the picture first comes up, my eye

goes immediately to the lightcolored

houses and then up to the

background mountains. Only then

do I return to the rainbow. But

you took the photo BECAUSE of

the rainbow, and to have it

become the third-strongest

element in the photo means it

doesn’t quite work.

What could you have done

differently? Probably nothing! It

would have been great to maybe have nothing but trees across the way, or an expanse of

something really dark so that the rainbow would stand out very colorfully and strongly. So is

there a way in Photoshop that you could achieve this same look? Is there a way that you could

create a second layer and, on that second layer, darken down the mountains and darken down

the houses? I’m sure there is, but would it really be worth your time? Nah, I don’t think so.

Luckily, there will always be more rainbows in your life.

Thanks, Linda, for posting these shots. Your sculpture photo is by far the best of the bunch. It

might even be worth a re-do sometime to see if you can change your shooting angle somewhat

to get rid of that little piece of land on the right. The lighted earring? Brilliant.

Carol Leigh

November 7, 2008

In an email I wrote back to Carol:

Thanks for being so kind Carol. I was really afraid you were going to rip me a “new one”. I didn’t spend much time on taking these photos and regret that.

I love your around the block photos. Thanks for sharing them. Wish I’d seen them before though. I need help on ideas. I’m not very creative…..YET!

Great online class. You are the best teacher!

Linda

Then Carol wrote back to me:

You know what? I don’t really care if your photos are bad (well, I

sort of do, but bear with me). What I really care about is that YOU

know your photos are bad! Knowing when your pictures are less than

wonderful is a HUGE step in our photographic process. Sure, our

friends, our parents, etc. are going to tell us we’re wonderful, but

WE really need to know, down deep in ourselves, when our stuff’s good

and when it ain’t. And that comes with practice and with comparing our

work with excellent photography.

I could tell that you were rushed with the golf course shots . . .

Maybe you should take up butterfly photography — you seemed to do

really well with that!

Carol Leigh

In order to understand Carol’s reference to my taking up butterfly photography, there was a mixup. Carol thought she was critiquing my Around the Block photos when in fact they were another student’s Around the Block assignment containing a butterfly photo!

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CRITIQUE: Linda Jeffers

Red, White, and Blue

BOAT BOW

You took something rather mundane, Linda, and

created a little jewel, which is kind of the point

of all my online classes — look around you, find

something, and compose it as best you can. In

this case, you isolated a part of a boat and filled

your frame with strong lines and bright color.

What was working against you (and I know,

because I was there) was harsh sunlight. From

the shadows it looks as though the sun was pretty

high in the sky, which is traditionally a tough

time for us to be

shooting. But in this case,

the bright sunlight and

the angle of the sun

created a relatively bold

shadow under the blue

crosspiece, which adds to

your composition in that

it echoes the stripe of

black paint in the lower

third of your picture.

Your shadow is dark

enough to be bold, yet light enough so that we still see the boat detail within it.

I like how you offset the vertical piece of wood — it’s over in the left third of the frame rather

than being centered. Nothing wrong with centering it, which would give a feeling of symmetry,

but I also like this offset look.

A large challenge here was metering. The lightest part of the image is the bit of white on the

right side. If your camera meters for the blue or for the left side of the boat, that bit of white on

the right is going to be very overexposed. I think that you came very close to having that

happen, but nope, we can still see some detail in the white, so all’s well. Good shot.

ART



Ha! “I don’t know anything about

ART, but I know it when I see it!”

This is a good example of red/

white/blue, with your clean, crisp

colors. But what happened here is

exactly what I was talking about

in your previous shot. Your

“ART” is perfectly exposed. But

because the red paint is darker

than the foreground mooring

lines, your camera exposed for

the dark red and the mooring lines

are blown out, way overexposed.

This happens to us all the time. Luckily, since most of us are shooting with digital cameras and

we have access to histograms and LCD screens that blink when we overexpose, we have superb

tools now at our disposal that we film shooters never dreamed of.

I know you know this, but it bears repeating. Whenever we encounter bright, sunny situations

and a lot of light colors, it behooves us to check our histogram after every shot. I’ve got my

camera set so that when I click the shutter, the histogram automatically comes up. I rarely look

at the image on my LCD screen, but I try to always check the histogram. If the graph is

touching the right side (the light side) of the histogram, I know I’ve overexposed. If I see

blinkies here and there — huge clue that I’ve overexposed. And then the solution is to use my

exposure compensation dial and take another shot, this time perhaps 1/3 or 2/3 stop under (-1/3,

-2/3). Check the histogram. No blinkies? The graph is backing away from the right? Then I’m

good to go. Oops, don’t forget to set my exposure compensation dial back to 0.

REFLECTION



I can see why you were attracted to this, and I

think I might have taken photos of this same

reflection. I, too, was taken by the red, white,

and blue colors. Did we succeed? I’m not

super-pleased with mine, and, in a second, I’ll

go find the shot, prep it, and will include it

here so you can see . . .

The tough part about photographing this

reflection was that first of all, it was

constantly in motion. So to try to focus AND

come up with a dynamic composition was the

real challenge. It was frustrating to focus on

what I thought looked good, only to have it

shape-shift away and lose the focus as well as

the design.

(I couldn’t copy and upload Carol’s shots she used as an example. Sorry.)

Well, no, my

photo is not of

the same

reflection as

yours. But it’s

still bad, as you

can see below.

Yes, the colors

are good, but

where’s the

design? Where’s

the line? Why

did I put the red

thing right in the middle? And, importantly,

why did I keep the darn thing?

Regarding your photo, there are two things

working against it. The first is the overall

dullness of the colors and the water. The red and the

blue is very good; the white is more of a cream and the

overall water looks sort of beige. This can be lightened

and brightened in Photoshop with relative ease.

But the other thing that’s not working is that there’s no

real pattern nor design, no focal point, no place where

we begin and end our visual journey around the frame.

As a result, we just sort of want to move on.

So, what’s the difference between an abstract reflection

that doesn’t work and one that does? I added a second

reflection shot of mine (below) that I like because the

reflections are bold and crisp, but there’s also a sort of

blocky design that I like — red lower left, dark block to

the right, darker block upper right, and lighter block

upper left. To emphasize this blocky look, I should crop

in from the left, getting rid of the blue color, as you can

see in the very bottom photo.

Thanks for posting these — very much appreciated.

Carol Leigh

November 1, 2008

Here I adjusted Levels in

Photoshop . . . (Again, sorry about not being able to show/upload Carol’s example.)

In response to Carol’s critique, I sent the following email to her:

Wow Carol. Did I get a lot from your critique.

First of all in my second shot “ART”, you are correct, I do know how to look at the histogram, but haven’t been looking at it I’ve been so concerned with focus. I forgot?

Secondly, I never even noticed the mooring lines being overblown! Hmmm. Don’t know where I was while prepping this photo.

And the 3rd shot of the color in the water, I looked for a design, a pattern etc and knew the composition was lacking something. I tried cropping this way and that but never felt anything looked right. So I see I need asking these questions you posed and posted on my critique using your photo as an example: “Yes, the colors

are good, but

where’s the

design? Where’s

the line? Why

did I put the red

thing right in the middle? “

I remember you repeatedly saying to take time, slow down (in Santa Fe). I think my new rule before taking a shot is to keep looking and asking myself questions before I ever take the shot. A little restraint. Yes, restraint has worked in other areas of my life big time, so why not in photography.

It was interesting yesterday. I hadn’t lately taken any photos for my Daily blog. The cloud formations and backlighting on the clouds over the San Jacinto mountains was breathtaking. I went out and shot off a few photos without thought before a phone call interrupted me and then the light had gone. The phone call was about possibly going to the Getty Museum to see a photography exhibit. So I went online and found an example of some of the photos at the exhibit. Here is the link to the blog photos I posted of the clouds I took on 11/1 …and the questions I asked myself secretly about why this guy’s cloud photo is featured in a photo show at the Getty. The “guy” is Alfred Stieglitz!!!!

Now I see there is no pattern to my cloud composition. That’s what had been bothering me. I hadn’t stopped to think about the composition. I liked the lighting but didn’t go further.

Long story short, you helped me answer a big question not only with the photos you critiqued but with why I initially began taking classes……..TO SEE! And I can’t see if I’m not slowed down enough to ask myself: What am I seeing, does it have design value or am I doing what I’ve done my entire life….recording/taking the photo for memory sake.

I think I may have had a mini psychic change. I hope so.

Thanks Carol. You always get me seeing, a little more, what I can’t see.

Linda

A couple hours later I received this email response to my email from Carol:

You know what’s interesting, Linda, is that when you signed up for

your very first online class and you gave me your website address, I

could tell IMMEDIATELY from your pictures that you needed to slow

down, to take a deep breath and think before clicking the shutter.

Knowing that when I did, so early in the game, I feel I’ve been remiss

in not pointing it out to you often enough throughout the online

classes and in the two in-the-field workshops you’ve taken. Better

late than never, I guess, but yeah, I can remember the “this woman

needs to slow down” flash going through my brain from the very beginning.

This doesn’t just apply to you, however. We ALL need to slow down and

think before we shoot. Why are we taking this shot? What do we like

about the scene? What’s the light doing? Are there weird things in the

background? Are there ugly hot spots that will ruin the picture?

Where’s the movement in this scene? Am I including too much? Not

enough? Would this be better as a vertical? What’s my ISO? Is my

exposure compensation dial accidentally still set to 3 stops

underexposed from the last shot? And much, much, more . . . Sometimes

I’m amazed we ever get around to clicking the shutter!

Carol Leigh

I’m still taken back by how much Carol opened my eyes to how my character/personality traits are everywhere, even in my photos. I feel like I’m wearing a new pair of glasses today. This is Good!

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Last week Ray and I were on the go non stop. Wednesday we drove in to the San Fernando Valley where I spoke. We spent the night over and Thursday, also in the SFV, we attended our home group meeting. Friday we attended the Just the Black Print Meeting Ray and I started here in Rancho Mirage. Then after the meeting we had dinner with some friends who driven out to the meeting. And Saturday we again drove in to the SFV to attend a friend’s 20th birthday. All last week I felt sick but now I’m home really sick with a full blown cold.

This week’s schedule was on the heels of having been away 8 days up in Half Moon Bay attending a loosely structured class with 11 other students, Norm and our teacher, Carol Leigh. Our assignment was to photograph the character and feel of HMB. By the way, I had an incredible time setting up my tripod and camera at 5am to shoot the setting full moon and later rising sun. The Beach Hotel where I stayed had a balcony that suited my early morning shooting needs without having to go out into the scary dark of the morning on the beach or pier.

I don’t know how many photos I shot. Tons. We were told to select 20 photos for submission to our teacher. She’ll take 3 photos from each students’ submissions and put together a book. Thank goodness my computer waited to crash until I was home. (I am now the very proud and happy owner of a new T500 Lenovo IBM, a 20″ Mac external monitor, Lightroom 2.1 and am waiting for Adobe Photoshop CS4 which is supposed to arrive this week. Lots of learning curves.)

Here are some of the photos I submitted:

Out on the docks, looking at Pillar Point Harbor Pier.

Silver pumkin outside the Mill Rose Inn B&B.

An attempt at photographing color at a local pumpkin farm.

Looking back at the Beach Hotel where I stayed.

So many students photographed great shots at the many pumpkin farms. We had great sunny days, but had hoped for clouds which make for better photos. This was a another attempt at a pumpkin festival shot.

This was one of the first shots I took before sunrise. I’d never shot with so little light before. Pillar Point Harbor.

We all called this Norm’s Pier. I don’t know the real name of it. It’s located at the northern end of the Half Moon Bay Beach. This was the first of two times I visited this pier for sunset shots.

Early morning shot looking north from my balcony at the Beach Hotel.

Reflections of dock pilings at Pillar Pt. Harbor.

A wider view of the dock.

An uninteresting boat that caught my eye because of the light on it.

First full moon rise I’ve ever shot. I was so excited and focused on the moon, I neglected to notice and avoid a big ugly dock feature in the lower right hand corner of many of the other photos.


First time I ever shot a setting moon. It’s hard to not blow out the moon and retain detail.

A point at the northern most beach of HMB.

A view of the house at the end of ‘Norm’s’ Pier.

Another moon shot over a hotel along the shore in HMB.

Pigeon Point Lighthouse. I arrived and started shooting a half hour before sunrise. As with all these shots, I used a tripod.

I turned around and shot the rising sun. Can you see two of my classmates?

A shot of the lights of the northern most land and naval equipment.

Ocean beach bluffs photographed on my return from Pigeon Point Lighthouse around 8:30am.

Shot seconds before the sun rose.

I was asked by my doctor if I’d bring in two framed photos from this class to hang in his office. Which two do you think would be best together?

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While up here in Half Moon Bay I went online and noticed I’d received the critique on Office Art. I did not like this assignment. I have trouble with setting shots up.

I’ll be leaving Half Moon Bay where I’ve been for the last 5 days to head over to my sponsor’s house in Concord, CA to attend her Baby Meeting on the Concepts. Tomorrow I return to the LA area and will be at my Home Group Meeting Thursday night and Ray! Can’t wait. I’ve had a great time up here photographing Half Moon Bay but it’s time to return home to Ray and my regular routine. I’ll be posting some of my favorites I shot this last week in a day or two.

1. CRITIQUE: Linda Jeffers
Office Art
CALLING CARDS

Good idea for a photo — lots of photos
of YOU! I like how you have them all
fanned out, and how you’ve created a
repeating pattern, not only of yourself,
but with all the words and letters and
the individual cards. You’ve effectively
pushed our eyes around the frame,
checking everything out. Well done. I
also like your limited depth of field.
There’s just one “Gottago” that’s in
focus while the rest blur out. It’s a very
good technique — shallow depth of
field so that everything’s soft except for one little thing, or one little “slice” of a shot.
Your exposure, focus, composition — all are good.
The only thing I’m wondering about is the bit of
background showing in the lower left corner. Is it a
distraction? Your picture’s all about repeating
patterns, repeating words, repeating forms. To have
something completely different and unrelated lower
left could be a distraction. But, frankly, it’s not a big
one. I just needed SOMETHING to talk about!

2. BODIE TYPEWRITER

This is interesting — both you AND Bruce Lloyd
submitted pictures of old typewriters. (I’m
wondering if we’ve got any “feet on old typewriters”
waiting in the wings! There have been more feet in
this class than I’ve ever seen!) Look at the difference
between your old clunker and Bruce’s old clunker.
His had boldness because of the red/black/silver
color combination. Yours has boldness because of
the strong stairstep forms you captured.
Let me talk about that a minute. Look at the three
triangles you put together in this shot. You’ve got one up top with the typebars, another formed by the “wedge” of keys, and then a third formed in the lower left
corner. Everywhere we have triangles we have diagonal lines (and perhaps everywhere we have diagonal lines we have triangles).
Wherever we have diagonal lines, we have movement. And you’ve got a lot of movement here.
I like the dust and weathered metal — they create an ambience that really adds to the concept of
your photo. Naturally, I wish it were sharper, but I
understand the problems we have when shooting
through glass, especially at Bodie. So all in all, I think
you did really well with this shot — especially with the
composition.

3. TRASH CAN

You had a lot of decisions to make when setting up this
shot. What do you put it on? What do you use as a
background? How do you keep the reflections from the
metal non-distracting (i.e., how do you keep YOU out of
the reflection?). And then, how do you crop this? Do
you include the entire trash can? Or do you (as you did
here) decide to clip off one side of it? Set-ups can be
difficult, and this is a good example.
Overall, I think you did a good job with it, especially
with the exposure and with the reflections. There’s
nothing being reflected that catches our eye and makes
us dwell on the reflection rather than the shape of the
trash can. And your background is clean and simple.
You put the trash can on a glass table that creates a
mirror-like reflection, which I think is very effective, a
very interesting touch.
You clipped off part of the right side. Does that look
like an artistic decision, or does it seem like an accident?
To me, it seems kind of accidental. Usually, when we
chop off something, we need to make it a really radical
chop (like in half) or we need to chop off something on
the other side. If we don’t, we run the risk of appearing
careless with our photography.
So then the question is, if we’re going to amputate, how
far should we go? Or would it have been better not to
have amputated at all? I think perhaps if you’d been able
to include the entire trash can in the shot, it would have
been better. We could have seen the form better and
we’d be less uncomfortable about part of it being
chopped off. Maybe a wadded up piece of paper at the
bottom somewhere would be a good touch to give a sense of size/perspective.
Thanks for posting these. We’re just three hours away from getting together here in Half Moon Bay — I should have done this in person!
Carol Leigh

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Everyone in our class is here in town now. There are 12 of us students and our teacher, Carol Leigh. It’s a good group.

At 2pm we met in Carol’s room, discussed what we’d be shooting for the end product – a book representing Half Moon Bay. Thought I’d post some photos I showed today in Carol’s room.

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At the end of our 3 and a half days of workshop shooting, Carol set us all up and evidently gave us very specific directions on how she wanted us to pose for a memorable group photo, directions I obviously didn’t understand. I’ve included the email Carol just sent to us all regarding the photos she linked us to:

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This is a fun group and I can’t wait for the Half Moon Bay workshop next week.

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CRITIQUE: Linda Jeffers
Twos and Threes

THREE ON TWO

Woof! What a terrific photo,
Linda. I’m not sure what I’m
looking at, or looking through, or
looking into, but it doesn’t matter
and I really don’t want to know.
What you’ve created is an abstract
image with a lot of mystery, a lot
of drama, and a lot of power. You
lined things up just right. Your
exposure is just right. I love the
little highlights running along the
horizontal elements in the shot. I
like the grainy look to the scene.
And I like how the cars are so out
of focus yet sharp enough that we
know we’re looking at cars.
Your three lights set the scene beautifully. The two cars?
Perfect. The grids that form a frame? Excellent. Do I have
any suggestions regarding how this picture could be any
better? Not a one. Major kudos, madam.

MULTI-PURPOSE VASES

This one’s good, too. I like how
you’ve got a lot of depth of field, a
lot in focus from front to back.
Usually this is the result of
selecting an aperture that’s quite
small — the smaller the lens
opening or f/stop, the more will be
in focus.
Your lighting is good in that it’s not
overly hot; there aren’t any distracting hot spots. Yes,
there’s glare on the glass, but it’s not overexposed and
we EXPECT glass to have reflectivity.
I especially like how you put the vases on the diagonal.
There’s also a diagonal line behind them, running in a
different direction. Those two diagonal lines give your
photo movement. We begin with the foreground vase,
move into the frame, and then the background diagonal
encourages us to move back toward the left. The vertical
nature of the vases and the reeds or stems within them,
give your photo a lot of height — yet another direction
for our eyes to go. Lots of movement here, and done in
an orderly fashion.
Interesting photo, well-composed, well-exposed, well
done!

HAPPY UGLY FEET

Ha! I wish I could say you’re the first to feature feet
in these classes, but Rebecca Ford (once of San
Francisco, now living in Mexico) beat you to it. She
would be pleased to see yours, however!
What makes your photo particularly compelling is
the lighting. The way the light is hitting your feet
and accentuating the texture of your skin and
creating shadows that set your toes apart is excellent.
What I also like is the combination of the bluishcolored
fabric at the bottom of the frame and how it
makes the warm golden tones of the background
look especially good. Complementary colors.
You created movement in
your shot by having a
long diagonal line lead us
up and into the frame; the diagonal line of your toes leads our eye
down to the foot on the left. Again, well done.
You should be INCREDIBLY pleased with these three photos.
They’re not the sort of thing you usually photograph, and I hope you
had a fun time doing it.
Carol Leigh

I am so surprised by the Woof! I got in the critique on the first photo – Three on Two. I had read tonight’s email I’d received while I was away in LA today. My friend Carol D. sent me the following email. I had not read my photo critique yet.

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1 CRITIQUE: Linda Jeffers
AlphaNumeric
WOODS LODGE

This is a very cool “C,” Linda. It’s got a sort of
primitive look to it that’s enhanced by all the grunge,
goop, drips, drops, splats, and splatters surrounding it.
The “1932″ is a nice little touch, too.
I like how you composed your shot, with the vertical
aspect of the “C” enhanced by your choice of a
vertical format. (So many times we mindlessly hold
our camera up, in a horizontal format, click, and don’t
consider how simply changing to a vertical format will
make already-vertical subject matter look even taller.
But I digress . . .)
The ONLY thing that could make this picture better
would be if it were in focus . . . You’re KILLING me
here! The shot looks really soft to me; if it had been
sharp, you would have nailed it.

2. MY INITIAL

Yay! It’s in focus! What a cheerful, splashy,
jubilant “J” this is. It’s all about boldness and
complementary colors (orange/blue) and the
entire shot just jumps out at us.
What makes your “J” especially interesting is
that it’s on a surface that has some shading and
texture to it. If the background had been a
plain, smooth orange color, it wouldn’t have
the same impact. It would border on boring.
But the background here is excellent for setting
off the “J.”

‘Tis a jaunty little “J.” It’s got personality. You
done good.

3 HIGHWAY 40 GRAFFITI

I have such a love/hate relationship with
graffiti (I feel like it lowers our overall quality
of life, yet the colors and designs can be
spectacular). In addition to the emotional
aspect of it, I also find it really hard to shoot.
The letters often merge into one another,
preventing me from isolating one particular
letter or number, which is frustrating. But I
think you photographed this “S” fairly well.
You’ve isolated the letter. You centered it in
the frame, which is fine, and the left-hand
black vertical thingie and the right-hand wood
act as internal frames, setting off the “S”
nicely.
The only thing I’m wondering about is your
shooting angle. It looks as though you were
standing off to the right, so the horizontal lines
of the cinder blocks are skewed at the bottom
but level at the top. Would the letter look better
if you’d shot straight on?
I brought your photo into Photoshop Elements
5 and, using the Transform/Perspective tool,
tried to tweak the picture so that it looked like
you shot from straight on. But my Photoshop
skills aren’t good enough to show you what it
would look like — it didn’t work at all. Sorry.
Good color, good focus, lots of drama. You
should be pleased!
Carol Leigh
P.S. The better the photos, the shorter the
critique.

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At the end of each class our photo teacher, Carol Leigh, posts a gallery of the student’s work during the class. Here is what Carol wrote in an email she sent out to all of us who were in her last class…………

And baby, do you all look great! What I did was select three photos
from each regular student, picking the three that I think are your
best. Here’s the web address:
<http://www.photoexplorations.com/Gallery012008/HTML/index.htm> This
gallery looks really good, and I think you’re going to be surprised at
the overall quality of everyone’s work. (Oops, that sounded sarcastic,
didn’t it? Not intended.) Let me know what you think.

I’m impressed with the photos we produced as the result of Carol’s instruction and critiques.

Hope you enjoy the gallery if you chose to check it out. Once in the gallery, click on a photo to enlarge and see the student’s name at the end of the URL in the browser. Carol picked my neon Elephant photo, the waterfall stairs and the lone gull flying over the Salton Sea as her 3 favorites to put in the gallery.

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