Photography tips

As I mentioned in my last post, I am going to present a few of the photos from the Street Parade. I selected 4 images out of the ones I took and I'll discuss them in detail. I will look at the composition of the pictures and why I liked or disliked them. So, lets cut the crap and get to the pictures.

The above picture is as-shot - see any "problems" with it?

Well, I saw a picture that had great potential. The exposure was good, there were some excellent points of Interest and there are a few horrible distractions. So, what I did was to crop it. to improve as many of these aspects as possible.

By doing nothing more than cropping the picture I got rid of (some of) the shadows on the Left hand side. The Annoying Blue sign in the original is also nearly almost gone as well. The Crop on the Right-hand side additionally removes the other Person and the banner they are carrying.

Now, if you look carefully at the composition you will note that I waited until the people in the Parade were positioned so that none of them had any distracting background elements in the wrong spot. In this case, you will note the light poles in the background are not growing out of anyone's head! In this shot, I wanted the emphasis to be on the pony, so I got down to the same height as the pony to take the shot.

Now, the final image has 2 strong elements - A Gift and a Horse......

 Next Image - Once again, I will show the Original full-sized picture, and what I did to improve it.

The original, while a pretty reasonable picture has that horrible annoying Pole Just near Mrs Claus. So, a bit of a crop and we get ...

Now, you can no doubt agree that this is a better picture by cropping out the main distracting part. Yet, this picture still has some distractions that could be removed if I spent a bit of time "cloning" them out. Did you guess what I am talking about? Yes, the tree Behind Santa  - you can see some leaves sticking up just above his head and the wire fence near Mrs Santa's arm.

Well, I decided not to remove them - because it would take a fair bit of effort to do so. What I liked most about this shot was the interaction of Both Santa and Mrs Claus with me. The people in the picture are engaging the viewer.

Now, I have selected a photo that was from my Reject list to talk a little about.

The picture was meant to capture the number of people who turned out to watch the parade - A sea of people. Yes, the photo was partially succesful - you can see that there are a lot of people all walking towards the area where the parade ends. Technically, the photo is just fine, but look at the final result of the composition.

The picture was as wide as I could shoot but look at that horrid shadow that is cast right across the bottom half od the picture. That is the reason why I decided to skip this one! You can see If I positioned myself about 20 feet forward of where I was, right at the edge of the shadow, I would have actually captured what I wanted.

Finally, I wanted to share a picture that I did choose to use that is exactly as-shot from the Camera.

Yes, it is Santa and Mrs Claus interacting with Children - with an almost endless croud in the background. It captured some excellent facial expressions of the Children all crowding around.

If you look at the shadow across the people just behind Santa, and then note that some of the crowd in the distance is in full sunlight again. I think this adds to the depth of the scene, and provides a nice seperation of the important parts as well.

Finally, I wanted to comment on all the pictures I took on the day. Around 50 photos, and all of them were technically ok. Nothing out of focus or blurred, all were exposed just fine. It was simply the subject of the pictures and The fact that when a parade is moving past you, I had very little time to get the images composed just right. That is why some shots were not soo good, some were improved by cropping and a few were great.

Like I said in my last post, I will be posting my best shots in my photoblog over the coming week or so.

So, Grab your Camera, go out and shoot a street parade. Whatever you do, don't forget to enjoy the event!