- This topic has 13 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 8 years, 10 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Good Evening Lenspiration!
This week, we need photos that fit Titus 3:5-6.
Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost; Which he shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour;
Your submitted photos will be used as a background to the verse as part of our VersePics Ministry. When I thought about this verse, the image that came up for me was either of water. (The washing of regeneration.)
Here’s the challenge: I want images of water frozen in motion. That means you could be swirling it in a bowl, letting it slowly fall in a sheet, or even looking at an waterfall, but I want to be able to see the water clearly and for you to use a small shutter speed to produce a sharp focus without any blurring of the water.
Full details on submission rules, the RAW submission link (the DFR), what the images will be used for, and everything else will be found here.
Thank you for your support as we seek to follow God’s will in the ministry he has given to us!
Ben
Sharpening Character’s VersePic DirectorAs a recap:
Request: A photo to backdrop Titus 3:5-6
Photo ideas: Water frozen in time
Deadline: Friday the 21st, July 2017- This topic was modified 56 years, 7 months ago by .
Though it may not be the “close-up” shot you’re looking for, this shot still portrays to me the idea of being “washed” because the water is visibly falling in sheets.
Attachments:
I have a couple pictures of water falls. When I think of this verse, I picture flowing water that carries away all the filth and dirt. Admittedly, this waterfall is a little small and doesn’t quite fit with “which is shed on us abundantly“, but it’s the best I’ve got.
I’m not quite clear on your “water frozen in motion,” and “without any blurring of the water,” though. How do you make it look in motion without any blur? You want water droplets suspended in the air? I’m attaching another water photo with splashing droplets in it as well.
I’ll attempt sending the RAW files as well.
Attachments:
Hey! I am not a PRO member, but here is a pic I took recently.I also submitted the DNG file on the Dropbox.
Attachments:
I thought the rain on the flowers showed being washed and new life.
- This reply was modified 56 years, 7 months ago by .
Attachments:
Here are the photos that I come up with! 😀 I’ve submitted them via the DropBox link, too. I’m not 100% sure about the way that I’ve processed them, but I suppose you can change that anyway! 🙂
~ Caitlin
Attachments:
Hello Lenspiration!
Thank you all for submitting photos! I greatly enjoy having so much participation, especially on a VPO with such a short deadline!
I’m going to be working on the VP tomorrow, but I may have to wait until the end of the week before getting back to you all. We’re just starting our VBS at church and with work and school my schedule is about to go nuts!
Thanks again!
Hey! I am not a PRO member, but here is a pic I took recently.
No problem, @jinnyschober! STS is free for anyone to participate in.
Love how you captured the rain like that, @blessingscaptured! How did you do it?!
To get the rain affect I used an oscillating sprinkler with low-angled, back-lit sunlight. I also used a shiny piece of inslation as a reflecter. A sutterspeed of 1/60 to 1/125 worked the best for me.
Good Evening Lenspiration!
I have to apologize for taking a while before getting back to you all on the VPO. My schedule was absolutely going nuts and things got really busy fast… Before we jump into any critique though, I’ll show you the final VersePic.
The first thing most of you will probably notice is that there isn’t a Lenspiration watermark with the Photographer’s name in the bottom right corner, and that’s because I wasn’t able to use any of your submissions for different reasons. The photo in the VersePic is actually one of my own photos that I shot back in June, and don’t worry, I know there’s plenty wrong with it… In any case, I thought I would walk quickly through some critique of the issues with my photo so it doesn’t feel like I only critique others’ photos!
DISCLAIMER:
I’ll try to focus on things that the photographer has done with the shot versus color adjustments and things that can be easily fixed in editing software. Additionally, please take all critique in the manner in which it was meant, to help you to grow as a photographer! I know I can be less than tactful sometimes, but I’m trying!
Here’s just a few of the problems that immediately jump out at me:
First, there are some extremely distracting over-exposed leaves off to the right. The over-exposure of the leaves was purposeful, as I wanted to make sure I would keep all of the detail in the shadows and in the water, but those leaves really need to be taken care of as they are right now.
Second, there is some noticeable camera shake here. Even though my shutter speed was “only” at an 1/8 second, I wasn’t using a tripod, and the camera moved just a bit. This honestly makes the photo look like it went through an oil painting filter, which isn’t that helpful. Thankfully, the camera shake wasn’t so bad that the photo was unusable, but it certainly shouldn’t have been there.
Third, that 1/8 second Shutter Speed honestly looks a little odd to me. It freezes motion, yes, but I was honestly confused the first time I looked the photo. “Was I trying to freeze the water in time? (use a shorter shutter speed) or was I trying to blur the water? (use a longer shutter speed) At the moment, the photo looks like it’s trying to achieve both of those goals at once (frozen blur?) and looks odd because of that.On to the submissions!
It was exciting to see all of the submissions come in, and I really appreciate all of your support for what we do! I didn’t have much time to sit and write, so I do apologize if I don’t elaborate as much as I should on the critique of your photo, and for not being able to critique every one of the submissions.
First I just want to thank Caitlin Compton for photographing quite a few shots of some water with a macro lens! I can’t show all six here, but I’ve chosen an example image that shows the main issue I ran into with these images.
Honestly the main issue I keep coming back to is that depth of field is just so shallow in all of the photos! Details I want to see such as where the water in the air connects to the rest of the water are obscured and I would have loved to see these macros with an Aperture that would allow more of the moving water to be in focus.
Now that I’ve said all of that, though, I do want to say that you did a much better job photographing water with a macro lens than I could have, and that I really appreciate you going the extra mile!
Hannah Jones submitted a photo of some zinnias in the rain. First, welcome to the VPO’s, and second, using a sprinkler to fake rain is an awesome idea! That also explains why the large leaves closest to the camera on the right don’t have any rain coming down in front of them! 😉 Seriously though, I would not have thought of doing that!
I have two pieces of critique for you. First, the photo feels a little off balance because of the arrangement of flowers to the left of the shot. Essentially there is a leading line in the arrangement of the zinnias that makes me look toward the left, and there isn’t any photo there to look at! Since there isn’t much to balance the photo on the right hand side, it feels as if the photo is “weighted” to the left. Really what I mean by that is you spend about 90% of your time looking at the flowers and maybe 10% looking around at the rest of the photo.
When I say that there isn’t much to balance the photo on the right, I mean that I don’t really feel that those large leaves are adding much to the composition. My rule of thumb is to always have a reason for placing anything in my photo, and in this case there just isn’t a reason to have the leaves in the shot that I can think of. On the whole this shot works well with some cropping, but it might have worked really well with the vase to the right of the photo or even just shooting with a portrait orientation. You can see what I mean as tried cropping square below.
Elizabeth Frazer submitted some great photos of completely different scenes.
I just want to say first of all that I really like this photo. I love that wood in the bottom of the shot, the mossy surroundings, the green everywhere around the water… I do feel the photo would have benefited from a Landscape orientation rather than the portrait orientation used here.
One quick thing: because the falls .. fall … to the right, my eye is drawn to see where all that water is going, but there isn’t any photo there to look at. Motion tends to guide the eye toward where the motion is going, so we generally want to balance the photo out by giving some space to let the viewer see where the motion is going. You don’t need to use a landscape orientation to do this. You could have moved the camera just slightly to the right to balance the photo out a little more and that would have been enough. Not a huge issue, but something that would have been nice to see!
Frankly, I’m a little confused by this photo. You have three subjects, the water, the forest, and the splash, but because everything is in focus, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to look at first. The main thing I would say about this photo is that I would have liked to see more sky to balance the composition out, and less of the water toward the bottom of the shot.
One thing that emphasizes your framing is that splash. In a shot with little movement you suddenly have this big rush of movement upwards and while you managed to capture all of the splash, you didn’t give any space beyond that movement. The splash directs me to the edge of your photo where you sky should be but isn’t. I just talked about the reasoning behind this with the last photo, so I won’t get into it here… Again though, this isn’t a cemented rule, just a rule of thumb.
Following that rule of thumb, this is really what I would have liked to see: (It’s amazing what you can do with a gradient these days!)
One last photo here!
I don’t really have much I can say about this. Framing largely is good, the water blur is great, and I’m loving the wet boulders… You do have a problem with camera shake here, though, similar to the problem I had with my photo. At a guess I would say you weren’t using a tripod, but were balancing your camera on something, and the camera moved slightly when you hit the shutter button. (I had the same thing happen to me many times!) The difference between your photo and mine is that you used a much longer shutter speed of 2 seconds. Seriously though, if you weren’t using a tripod, you did a much better job of eliminating camera shake in the two seconds than I did in 1/8 second! (Something I only just thought of is that I should have used a 1 second timer so that the camera wouldn’t move when I hit the shutter button… I wonder if that would work…)
Just one more photo by Jonny Schober and we’re done!
First, I appreciated how you underexposed the photo so that the water reflections wouldn’t lose any detail. Good job on thinking about even small details like that!
Something I would have liked to see is a little more of the bank of the creek. Maybe a zoom out a little bit more so we can see more of the large rock to on the top of the photo?
Ultimately, none of the submissions worked out for what I was looking to do. One thing I do want to mention is that there were some submissions that I wanted to use, but I couldn’t because they were in a portrait orientation. Every one of the VPs photos has to look good cropped square for the Phone Version and in a 4:3 crop for the Tablet version, which some of the submissions couldn’t do. No matter how great a photo is, if I can’t crop it to what I need, I can’t use it! When shooting for the VPOs I’d appreciate it if you could keep that in mind. Thanks!
Even though none of the submissions worked out, I really do appreciate you all being willing to help out over here. Thank you!
Ben
VersePic Director
http://www.sharpeningcharacter.comHi Ben,
Thanks for the critique. 🙂 It’s helpful to know why the photos didn’t work so we can do better next time!
Looking forward to shooting some pictures for the next VPO.
~ Caitlin
Thank you so much, @bensharpeningcharacter, for taking the time to critique all those shots! I’ve drawn this up into a blog post that I’m going to share later today. I think this was VERY helpful to the participating photographers. Looking forward to the next VPO when you have the time to post it!
The topic ‘Titus 3:5-6 VersePic: Water (July 17-21)’ is closed to new replies.