* Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #815 / Revived #035 on 2023 11 29 *

Welcome, Pete! Hope you'll enjoy your visit here, come back again and share more images and your own thoughts about the images you find here. I don't take pictures like these, so I don't think I have the expertise to offer much in the way of critique, so I'll just offer my own reactions. Others here are better equipped to help you with the challenges of travel portraits, OCL, and scene setups.

Here's my own reactions: Both seem quite nice keepsake shots from a fun adventure. I prefer the second photo. Your wife looks most relaxed in this one, and less contrived. Her outfit is adorable. The full boat is in the scene along with its reflection. It and she are at about the thirds markers of a standard composition. There is no pale orb of light in the sky to wonder about. The sunset colors are lovely and muted, conducive to a portrait backdrop. The lighting is not overwhelming but is enough to illuminate her face. I might have looked around for any piece of local on-site junk to sit her on, like a rock or an old cement block but maybe there wasn't anything. In the first shot, both boats feel like they are too cut off and the spacing seems a little awkward. I'm just speaking from my own visual reactions and I've confessed this isn't my area, and I'm known to favor as much context as I can fit in a frame, so you might want to disregard my thoughts and wait for someone else to happen by!

Hi Pete,
Welcome to this forum, It’s great to see new users joining us here on “THE PHOTO”.

Pete is my brother, and we have a lot in common, for example, we are both UK EX-PATS and moved to countries starting with the letters “AUSTR…” while I stayed in Europe, Pete moved on much further afield :-)
And,… we both have a love of photography.

It's been a bit quiet here this week on the website, maybe more comments will come soon.

I also like the 2nd photo best. Kate looks quite relaxed here, and the gentle sunset colours and the reflections in the water work well.
Using the OCF (off camera flash) was a good idea to light up "your models", without it they would have been quite dark and needed a lot of shadow pushing in pp.
The flash also helps to keep your shutter speed up and avoids any motion blur. It gives the shot more studio quality.

Keep posting :-)
Trevor

Let me extend another warm welcome to our little group of likeminded people.

I don't have much to add to what was already said by Fireplace and by Minnie.
The flash has been used effectively here, for the reasons stated, but also because it allowed to keep the background darker than it would have been if the whole image had been exposed for the light levels throughout : your human subject would have been darker and the background a bit brighter.

Unfortunately there is little if any advice I can give in the territory of flash use.
Except for occasional use of studio lights, I have always been an available light photographer.
Sensor improvements and fast lenses have cemented those habits.

"Down"

We have had a bit of snow , so here we have a single snowflake on a black Perspex sheet lighting LED , Z7II with Laowa 100mm F2.8 2X macro cropped a good bit

That's beautiful. I have tried this in our rare snow events but never had nearly as much success as you've had. Exquisite, magically rendered detail. You say it is cropped - does the original, before adding the digital frame, have the full snowflake with the points on the top and bottom? It's too beautiful and perfect for those two edges to be covered up. I think it would benefit from showing the whole thing and giving it a fair amount of breathing room on those edges.

The digital frame was a failed sneaky attempt to hide the points at the edges 😀 No matter how careful I was or what I tried out the edges of the flakes { this is the bets of many failed attempts} either broke off or melted . I would have loved to get a full one intact but alas hypothermia was kicking in

Our craft allows us to be sneaky, and hide what we don't want to show. But I am a big fan of nature's imperfections. I seek them out deliberately. Might we see the full frame with the broken/melted edges?

I'm another who has had a full on few days and I haven't got around to my usual responses to the Weekly C&C. I did a quick flip through and discovered my backyard. I'm in Adelaide. That tree silhouette at sunset is what Ted Egan calls "Australian Lace." There isn't much of it here but it is distinctive and unmistakeably Australian and I'd guess that we are on The Murray. It's an area awash in vineyards so that fits as well.
Like Roel, I never use a flash, I wouldn't know how to set it.I'd have simply ytried to raise the shadow area in PP but if I had done that, it would have ruined the silhouette of the trees. Any way, this is a record shot of a couple thoroughly enjoying themselves at a particular place. The controlled light brings out the features that tell the story. The Zodiac is probably the tender for The Julie Fay and this hints at a bit more of the adventure.
Where are we travelling next?

"Backyard Colors"

We are in the ring with them and this gives the shot, cough, punch. Usually boxing photos tend to be from a lower angle with more balance between the fighters and it can't get the subjective feel that Roel has managed. The eye is fixed on the opponent and us. The black hair and beard line creates a frame for the face and eye. The white glove shows us a nose that could be in better shape. On the wall behind, the dream and the big time.
Outstanding.

A little masterclass in rule breaking. Three different possible subjects with almost no leading or connecting lines to guide us. It has the feel of an Asian brush and ink scroll painting and the buildings suggest Asia as well. I can't think of any examples of the style that would have attempted a composition like this
Finally, what we get is a puzzle. The missing details invite us to use our imagination to fill in the gaps. I'm hoping that Simplejoy will spill the beans and we will find that the scene has nothing whatsoever to do with Asia.

Fantastic capture and great use of texture and colors!

This is a fantastic composition - very effective and well balanced in every way, including the tones and subtle gradients. Excellent work!

Thank you for the interest. Here's what's really there:

It's just some roof I shot as a quick lens test. Rule-breaking in terms of composition? Yes, certainly. It doesn't feel right for sure, but at the same time, I felt that's actually a perfect fit, because of course you're gonna notice something's off when the proportions, distances and even functions of objects are significantly different in real life from how they're presented in a photograph. So I decided to keep it that way.

I'm glad you mentioned Asia, because some sort of temple was what came to my mind as well, when I first managed to create a suitable crop of the image without the real roof in there... Great to hear it wasn't just my weird imagination (as it often is).

Wanna know the real rule-breaking? The lens I shot this with is a mirrored lens. No mirror-lens as we know it, but a lens which is completely closed at one side and there's a mirror. I have no idea how lenses like that are used in real life, but of course they would be unusable on a conventional camera. So I unscrewed the mirror from the back of the lens, took the rear group of another lens with similar focal length and it was almost a perfect fit:

I guess no one would have guessed that a weird combination of Japanese industrial lenses (one supposedly used in a minilab in the US, the other one in some machine or application in Germany) would take an image of a structure reminiscent of Asian houses on top of an old farm house in the Austrian alps.... 😅

"Walking Alone"

I like this a lot. Whatever you did with the colors enhanced what was already there, and really looks nice. Sweet gum leaves are my favorites!