Australian Photography — January 2018

THINK FOCAL POINT
According to Trevor Wilkinson: “There is something
about the light in Italy that gives skies in particular a
soft nature and is quite often captured by artists. The
lighting in the square is quite spectacular after dark and
hence a very popular spot for the many tourists that
visit. I cropped the foreground to get in closer to the
people and the more important elements of the scene.
The slow shutter speed has captured the movement of
the people in the foreground.  It was just getting dark
and the light in the square with the activity of people
moving around made the shot appealing.”

This is a good time of evening to shoot as there

is a lot of ambient light and there is good colour

in the sky and land areas. The down side is that as

the light drops and the ISO increases dramatically,

there is a higher incidence of noise. The good news

is that you can reduce this in postproduction with

your denoising feature. However it is not as easy to

remove that massive Bulgari advertisement centre

frame. Sadly the lines of the wonderful buildings on

the sides help draw our eye to that blight. I suggest

a better point of view - with more of the traditional

architecture and without the ad.  Your cropping the

foreground was a good start but why didn’t you

just step in closer to shoot?  As for blur in moving

figures, it can be great, but in this case, it would be

ideally better to have the foreground woman much

sharper while the background figures were more

blurred, rather than the reverse. 

SAIMA’S TIP: A bigger, busier scene shot with

a wide-angle lens does not mean a better image.

More is not better.

TITLE: Night Scene

in St Mark’s Square,

Venice

PHOTOGRAPHER:

Trevor Wilkinson

DETAILS: NIkon D90,

18-200mm Nikkor lens

@ 22mm focal length,

@ 1/8s @ f3.8 3200

ISO, handheld

TITLE: Pelican in action

PHOTOGRAPHER:

Iris Deraedt

DETAILS: Panasonic

DMC-LX100 @ 34mm.

1/500s @ f16, ISO 800.

DO YOUR SUBJECT JUSTICE

Iris Deraedt is quite new to photography and still learning,

but was happy with the end result of this shoot. She said:

“It was taken in Monkey Mia where everybody usually

goes to see the dolphins but I find that the pelicans are

deserving more attention. Here I was doing some try outs

with the burst and continuous shooting settings.”

My main issue with this shot is that at least 90% of the

shot is water while that poor pelican occupies less than

10% of the frame. If the subject is far away, you need to get

in much closer to fill the frame more with the key content.

SAIMA’S TIP: While testing the settings of a camera,

don’t forget about composition and the image which is

the real goal after all.