Some snapshots of S'pore Garden Festival with my prosumer camera

[Clockunder]

Camera : Nikon Coolpix 5700

Date taken : 21 Dec 2006 (Thursday)

No. of pictures : 10

Went together with a social group 12 family members and relatives and so didn't have enough time to carefully examine and admire everything in the event.

Critiques are most welcome.


#1


#2


#3


#4


#5

[Clockunder]

#6


#7


#8


#9


#10

[noob117]

i like them alot.
but for the colours did u photoshop?

[bwilly]

good take, put some DSLR users to shame..

[westwest1]

Originally Posted by Clockunder #4 #5

very simple and clean photo....

[Clockunder]

Originally Posted by noob117 i like them alot. but for the colours did u photoshop?

For the colours, I didn't make any adjustment.

For all of them, I reduced the brightness (so that the background is less prominent) and increased the contrast.

For #4, I selected and then significantly darkened the background which was too distractingly bright. Here's the original picture which actually looks more realistic :



For #5, I selected and desaturated the background so that the flowers in the foreground stand out more.

For #10, I burned out the bright lights near the top left corner because they were too distracting.

[Clockunder]

Originally Posted by bwilly good take, put some DSLR users to shame..

Thanks for the kind comment.

[Clockunder]

Originally Posted by westwest1 very simple and clean photo....

Simple photo seems to have clear centre of interest.

For #2 and #6, viewers may wonder what the main centre of interests is as there are too many things included. I think I should have been zoomed in a little more and be more focused.

The main problem was getting a shallow Depth of Field (to make the main subject stands out) with such a small image sensor on the prosumer camera. The most I could do was to use maximum focal length (71.2mm in this case) and thereby have to shoot from a couple of metres away in order to accommodate the subject in the frame.

Thanks!

[Outlook]

Hi, Clockunder,

Show your skill again !

Like #1, #5, and #10. Nice background and very good composition.

The lighting was very poor there. Also tried using my A710IS, difficult to get a clean background, even very close to the flower and F no was set to F2.8.

[phantasmal]

i like the pics v much, you have a gd eye for them.

[lukexav]

Originally Posted by Clockunder #10

Did you climb up and swing tyhe orchids??


Nice..

[smallaperture]

Originally Posted by bwilly good take, put some DSLR users to shame..

Please dun say that. I would say that some fixed lens cam could give results almost as good as
dSLR....... How about that?

Merry Christmas to one and all.

[Clockunder]

Thanks all for taking the trouble to leave comments.

My pictures are still far from being very good as they still lack strong artistic elements.

From my observation in this forum, critical comments will do a lot of good for improvement. I have noticed some people shoot almost every week for more than 1 year and yet there has been little or no improvment because their friends in the forum only exchange pleasantries. Therefore any suggestion for improvement are most welcome here.

In any case, there is another picture which I find the flower's colour is a bit off because of the built-in direct flash which I fired (at -2 EV power) in this occasion to slightly illuminate the flowers in a dark corner. I selected and the desaturated the background so that the flowers stand out in front.