Why doesn't my PHOTO look GOOD? An honest composition review

a big thanks to squarespace for sponsoring this week's video so in this video i'm going to critique some of the photos that have failed recently i'm going to try and explain why they failed at the time when i was taking them i probably didn't see this but i'm going to go back to them and explain why they failed i'm also going to show some photos that worked as well [Music] i could dry out in the for sun follow the deep dark ocean down [Music] morning everybody fantastic to see you all again you can see i've got a little bit of a different setup here in my studio because i want to show you my monitor and go through some of the images on here and what i want to do is go through a bit of a composition critique so go through some photos that didn't really work and i get a lot of these a lot of the photos that i take don't work i think they're going to work in the field and then i get back and i'm just disappointed with them i'm sure everybody can relate to that so i'm going to go through and explain why i don't think they work and then talk about some photos that do work as well and hopefully that'll be useful um and you can see what goes through my head when i'm composing images so first of all this shot here so this was an amazing snowy day that we had a few weeks ago this is local to me just on the west side of the peak district and i went to this spot here and it was snowing you can see if if you zoom in a little bit that the snow just coming down it looked fantastic and this sheep just came here and i knew i didn't have a lot of time so i waited for the sheep just to be in the right spot there was this bunch of trees and there was a little bit of faint walls in the background and this is a photo that nearly worked but didn't quite work and and the reason being is that here this area here is just too messy this area here that i didn't really notice the time of sort of bushes interferes with the background trees i think if this wasn't there we had the curve of the snow going down here and down here and it was like a valley leading down through i think that would have worked but because i had this messy area here this area sort of draws your eye all the time so it's nearly there but it isn't quite there and then if i go to the next image here this was when it was snowing really hard and i wanted to get sort of a feeling of that snow and i was really struggling for composition because i was walking up through this path here and i just thought this stone looked good in the foreground but it's just too complicated i mean i could crop off this area here and i could crop off this area here but the really interesting part was this tree here so i sort of realized that when i was taking the shot so i moved a little bit closer and you can see that the next shot and there's some people walking down here but the next shot was was this one a little bit closer and then when i got to this shot i thought i'm too close um and i'm cutting off the top of the trees so i needed to move a little bit further back and then when i went to this shot i think this one works the best so i think i'm nearly there with this shot but it still isn't isn't quite there for me so i feel that even though i've got the atmosphere and i've got the snow coming down and that looks fantastic i've got the right shutter speed for the snow i just feel that this fence just feels like it's sort of an afterthought to the composition um i actually don't know if there's a great composition here i have thought about just chopping off and just including this bit but i think it needs this breathing room here but i think if this was a wall going down but because the fence is sort of just too i suppose it's got a heavy weight to it and your eye just draws down to it all the time for me it's not quite there it's probably and seven or eight out of ten but didn't quite think it worked so then on a different day when it was really snowy the snow had finished coming down and i was shooting this scene here and i felt that this was probably going to be the shot that would work the best you know everything seemed to come together we had this sort of really sort of fairy tale feel to it um but again i don't think this shot works and i think the reason being is that there's just your eye just darts around a lot you you go to this central tree here which is what i ended up being a really good shot for me but this central tree here and then you go to this tree and then you go to this sort of um fur tree here and it doesn't really look like i've concentrated on any one thing that doesn't look like this purposeful composition in it and from that point of view i don't think this works however if i zoom in a little bit and just go for this tree which is what i did and this is what ended up being prima one of the shots is a portfolio shot of mine then you can see that suddenly it becomes a much more interesting shot in fact i've got a print here let's have a look at this so you can see with this this print here it it just works really i i had to as i showed in another video just just clone out a little bit of that tree that you could see on the left hand side here but i think the whole thing just works as a standalone composition and sometimes in photography you've got to cut out things that maybe look interesting but don't add to the overall composition of the scene and i think this is a really good example where i went from that wider shot with the three trees in it to this sort of more narrow portrait orientation which i think just looks a lot better it's a very good portrait of this tree and i think that's why it works okay so let's go on to another one actually i've got another print to show you so there's a print here that i think looks pretty good so this one is another good example of a composition that i think works so this is a shot that i took um whilst i was driving home actually i just stopped to the side of the road i knew about these trees i've photographed these trees before and i think the reason this composition works is that i've got this central tree here and because these trees are a slight angle um within the scene then you get that drop off with the fog and that because they're fading away it creates this really nice position for the tree to come into and i purposely did that so i could have gone a little bit further around this way but i think then the two elements of the scene would have been too detached but having it like this it sort of connects this tree to these trees but the fog helps separate them as well and then i really thought about the distance that i've got on the side of the image so here and here because i think that makes a difference as well if you go too tight then i think it doesn't give it enough breathing room but i think this just works quite well and then the other thing that i noticed in the field that i really liked was this shadow that was being created there wasn't a lot of light but there was a little bit of light coming through and it was creating this shadow here that then sort of disappeared into the snow and i feel by giving it a little bit of breathing room here that shadow works really really well in the scene so i was really pleased with this it worked really well it's one of my favorite shots this winter um and yeah i i really like it so this was a shot i took when i was in madeira you saw it on the video i'll i'll put a link up here somewhere up there somewhere um and it it was a lot of serendipity especially with the bird landing here but i feel that um everything came together in this shot i wanted to talk a little bit about the composition because i think it's important so i've really thought very hard about the positioning of this tree and it was quite hard to get into the position that i wanted to be to get it just right so you can see that the branches don't interfere here they just don't interfere there so that was really important to me and then i also wanted to make sure that the branches didn't go above the the line of this mountain in the top and that's really important because that mountain just gives you that perception that we're not just um you know we haven't just got these mountains here but there's bigger mountains in the background which gives the scene a vast a feel to it so by having that mountain just up here is really important but if it appeared and the tree had gone over the top of it then that wouldn't have worked so much so that was really important obviously the bird landing was just look um but then i also wanted to include this tree here because i fit i felt like without that tree there it was just a little bit too simple the scene but having that tree there just anchors this right hand side of the shot and i feel like then the whole image just comes together the final thing that worked on this composition was waiting for sunlight to hit the tree and then you know that sunlight lit up the actual foliage in in the foreground here and that foliage when it was lit by light that was then separated from the background a little bit more which added to the three-dimensional feel and the composition of that image so there's a lot of elements that came together to make this image work and i i was really really pleased with it um again in this shot i think everything just came together to make it work um it was slightly different same century different time of day and i did a long exposure here because i wanted to blur out the white cloud and i feel like this allows the tree to stand forward of the background so clever use of shutter speed was was really important in in this shot there's a few things i'm not sure about with this shot i don't like this area here where people have walked around i feel like it's you know on on the previous shot you can see that that area gets hidden a little bit whereas on this one it's a bigger part of the composition but yeah i give that a nine out of ten and then there was a few of the tree shots i wanted to speak about so the first one was this one so this was a shot of the tree i moved into a different position and i felt this worked as well again i thought very carefully about the position of the of the branches up here unfortunately when i was taking this one the background mountains didn't appear so i like this shot i love the coloring of the shot the purple and the green work really well together but it just doesn't have that depth that the other shot has which is which is a shame and then this is a shot that didn't work so this was a shot that i tried i really like this branch here just um all this tree here just falling over but i feel like i was just trying to get over complicated with it i was trying to get one of the branches in with the clouds in the background and the other one in the dark mountain but i just couldn't quite get into the position but i was just trying to be so over complicated with this and what i should have done was just forget it um i don't like the fact that the tree just comes up here the blue sky just pulls your eye away as well which i don't think works i felt like it might work in a black and white but it didn't when i tried it so yeah i don't think that worked um there's just too much going on that the this in shade this in sunlight this tree here this tree here it's just too complicated and and because it it's got a lot of things going on i just don't think it works as a composition very well i wanted to talk a little bit about um finale forest a little bit more and um i took a lot of shots here i think i took over a thousand images a lot of them didn't work most of them didn't work so this is a good example of a composition when i was in the field that i thought was going to be so good um and i really was careful about where i positioned all the trees and this tree here but then when i got back i just felt that this tree just ruined it yeah so this tree here just didn't quite work in in in the composition i felt that um i should have probably just thought more carefully about this side of it i i always think about visual weights about what draws your eye and i and sometimes it's good to use visual weight to draw your eye in a particular way but in this particular scene i want my eye to go through it and i feel that i'm being pulled to this complicated area just at the right hand side here maybe this tree here just just doesn't work either and then i've got to crop in too far that this tree goes off the side so i i'd have to crop in even further and it just doesn't work as i had intended oh i should say if you're liking the video please give it a thumbs up you know that really makes a difference to me and helps the youtube algorithm and i'm really interested in your comments below what do you struggle with in terms of composition okay on to the next image this shot here again i was um composing it and i felt like it was going to work quite well i really like the shape of this tree um and i thought i've just got it in this gap here and i thought that's going to work really well and then i got back to my hotel room and i was looking through the images and i thought this just doesn't work but i felt it would work if i had more fog and i just changed the separation between this tree and this tree here and then i managed to actually do that so i went back and there was more fog and i got this shot which is how i intended it really so it gets rid of the background i've got a better separation between this tree and this tree and you know this transforms that previous shot into something that's pretty spectacular really so and this is part of my black and white series that i haven't shared yet but it's one of the shots in my black and white series of um madeira not just for now but the whole of madeira and again in a similar manner this was another shot that worked very well again part of that black and white series i liked how these trees were sort of bending over to the right hand side almost cowering away and this tree here was sort of the wizard just sort of casting a spell on them so i really like this and it's all about separation this and i think just getting that separation right in this image has massively helped to generate something that i think's pretty pretty interesting so yeah i like that and then finally i can show you a print which is this one here um so if i just grab it here we go so this print is a shop that um again is all about the balance of using fog to separate elements and the distance between trees um and this is called the finale family and i just love how you know we've got the small um child toddler at the front just running away and then um mum and dad and the teenagers here and i just feel that it works really well but i was so careful on this image i tried to shoot this image so many times and it didn't quite work and it was like little things like where i placed that branch there where this branch came in conjunction with the branch in the background i wanted it to be overlapped elements but i just wanted to be super careful about how that worked so you can see the distance here i've got and i didn't want that part of the branch here to overlap the trunk in in the background and i wanted separation between these two so it looks like this tree is sort of running away a little bit so i thought very carefully about this um and the light came out and everything just worked on this image i was so so pleased with that yeah this is one as well that is a portfolio shot that's on now on my site okay the final image that i want to talk about is an image that um worked but i want to sort of go through the process of how that worked i talked about this a little bit in my video on seascapes um and it's it's this image here so i'll show you the print first actually so it's this print here probably not gonna be able to see it very well but you you can probably get an idea so this print is um again an image that's on my site and you know it took a lot of thinking about as well i i was down at the beach taking shots for about three hours and it took me a while before i actually got to the location where i i could get this and before i talk about it in a little bit more detail i want to show you um a couple of prints a couple of images that i took leading up to this so this um so this was one of them and you can see that i i was really careful about the positioning of these rocks which i'll go into on the print but the thing that mattered to me was this area up here because there was this rock that was just in front of this big um see stack here and this rock sort of blended into the sea stack but then i realized that there was waves crashing and when a wave crashed over that rock it separated that rock from the sea stack so it wasn't so much that i was just trying to catch that crashing wave although that looks good but it was also that that separated the sea stack um from that rock in the front so you can see that in this one where it isn't crashing at all um it just it just doesn't work and that rock just blends into it and that's really that jars in the composition it doesn't feel comfortable to look at that whereas you can see that on on the shot that i finally took here i've got a wave crashing over that rock and that separates it from the sea stack in the background and that is what makes this image in my opinion i mean i had to take quite a few images on this because i had to obviously i was using a 14 millimeter lens and um i had to get the focus right so i focused and got this right so that was sort of taken care of and then it was just a question of getting this element right when the when the wave crashed and then in terms of these rocks at the bottom um what was really important for me was just to think about things that were leading through to this main boulder so this was that this was the thing that i was trying to take a picture of this was the boulder that i really really liked i thought this boulder was really interesting i like the pattern on it um and so i just wanted to get that angle right so there's nothing distracting at the bottom so in those bottom corners your eyes sort of led through into that boulder um and it took a while i tried a few different boulders before i got to this one and i didn't feel that they quite worked but this one worked really well so yeah i think that combination of that boulder that wave and the sea stack and then the just soft pastel colours and that blue tone in this is what makes it you know quite a strong composition i obviously wanted to give a little bit of room at the top of the image just to make it look a little bit stronger and everything came together and it worked really well okay so i hope that's been useful i hope that's helped you it's something that i feel that i go through every time i try and understand what's worked and what hasn't in my compositions if you want to look at any of these photos then they're on my website my website is built with squarespace who um sponsored this week's video so thanks to squarespace so if you're looking for a website then squarespace is an amazing all-in-one platform to build your portfolio using the amazing galleries or an online store and if you're ready to go live with that then make sure you go to www.squarespace.com forward slash nigel for 10 off so thanks ever so much for watching don't forget to give it a thumbs up and until next sunday bye

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 260,075

Keywords: photography, composition, photography tips, photography composition, landscape photography, photography for beginners, composition techniques, nigel danson, Nigel Danson photography

Id: f4ttm6iVcz4

Length: 20min 39sec (1239 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021