# Bird, bird, bird, bird, mechanical bird?



## TJ1985 (May 14, 2016)

These are different for me. It's the first time where I approached the subject with a concern toward composition. Normally I'm a shooter who sees something and clicks it. The background isn't what I look at, so I tend to ignore it both as a picture taker and as a picture viewer. With these I tried to take things a little more seriously and focus on things besides the subject itself. Is the background going to help me? Will it distract? Does it offer any contrast to the foreground? Does it give a "context" for the picture? Does it add anything to the picture? Stuff like that, I've never even considered it until very recently. I'm incredibly leery to take up the title "photographer" as I'm just a hack. The camera settings... it's like the Macarena Fad of the 1990s: I do not understand and I do not think I am capable of understanding. Frankly, Fujifilm has been making picture-taking tech since 1934 so I'm willing to trust them with Automode. 

That's especially true with these shots. Birds are so damn hard to capture for me as they are quicker than I am, and they are jittery little rascals. If I tried to twiddle the settings to get the perfect capture on any one of these... I'd come home with no pictures. Some of these gave me a very narrow window of opportunity. Birdy would come into my shooting zone, I'd get a good focus, and I'd snap it. My camera would display the picture I just took for 1.5 seconds before returning to the shooting mode, but when it returned to the shooting mode the bird would be no longer there. Someday I'll become a master setting twiddler but for the time being I'm enjoying just letting automode do the tricky stuff while I focus on composition and getting a good shot.  

Enough talking, "Don't tell me, show me" blah, blah, blah. Writers.... So singleminded sometimes. 







(Love the last one. Dude is lookin' at me like "What are YOU lookin' at?") 

I'm not sure why I snapped this. It's not a "great" picture. Truly, he was pushing that Bell helicopter to the firewall and I snapped as quickly as I could while trying to manually track him. No tripod, no nothing, just hand-held shooting. Plus, he was coming at me fast and was nearly overhead as you can see. Stupid shot but I was amazed I even got him at all. I basically didn't have a chance to track him as I couldn't crank my neck hard enough to see him. I wasn't able to look through the viewfinder so it was a really miraculous shot for me.



I'm trying to learn this stuff. ANY criticism/critique besides "you suck" is welcome.


----------



## LeeC (May 14, 2016)

These are nice and I love nature shots. Maybe time for the next step? 

I think the modern writing dogma re show versus tell is bull crap in being a fast-track formula approach for those lacking writing skills. With the visual game though it's the essence of the art. So what I'm getting at is more of a story in an image. Such has been accomplished with the simplicity of a grayscale portrait, all the way to an action scene. The idea being to give the visual media depth (not the cleavage depth overdone today) so the viewer sees a story in the image. For example, your last bird shot in more of a closeup might bring to the viewer a sense of wonder in another life forms consciousness. 

As in writing, create a context in which others can think. You get the picture ;-)


----------



## Firemajic (May 14, 2016)

For me, the river is a special place, serene and peaceful, your pics portray that mood... the second pic shows how huge that boulder is and there is a peaceful vibe displayed in the stance and posture of the birds..


----------



## TJ1985 (May 14, 2016)

LeeC said:


> These are nice and I love nature shots. Maybe time for the next step?
> 
> I think the modern writing dogma re show versus tell is bull crap in being a fast-track formula approach for those lacking writing skills. With the visual game though it's the essence of the art. So what I'm getting at is more of a story in an image. Such has been accomplished with the simplicity of a grayscale portrait, all the way to an action scene. The idea being to give the visual media depth (not the cleavage depth overdone today) so the viewer sees a story in the image. For example, your last bird shot in more of a closeup might bring to the viewer a sense of wonder in another life forms consciousness.
> 
> As in writing, create a context in which others can think. You get the picture ;-)



I'm not sure what the next step would be. I am going to delve into the settings more, learn to be more active in the process instead of... setting the camera to the automode and letting it do all the work. 

In that pic, I'm not really sure what to do with it because I was zoomed in as far as my camera can go optically. I always shoot in large format (4000x3000px 72dpi stock) and I might be able to crop in to give a large format picture that looks like I was far closer than I was. I resized these to 1800x1350 just so the forum wouldn't freak out with 'em. Plus, thanks to Hughes Satellite being sooooo generous, I need to watch out that I don't blow through my 170mb per day. Yeah, 170mb.

I wandered through a little graphical editing on it: 



To me, having the rocky bank on the other side was important to me. Don't know why, it just is, lol. 

Julia, thank you.


----------



## midnightpoet (May 14, 2016)

To me, having the rocky bank on the other side was important to me. Don't know why, it just is, lol. (quote)

It framed the bird, tj.  Gives the photo points of reference. Good job.


----------

