Member's pictures

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Cecil Hodgson sent in some pics from the recent outing to the Butterfly Farm and I have chosen two to put up here.

I'm not knowledgeable about birds so I don't what kind this one is. Nonetheless it is a good picture of the little fellow. The picture is well composed, sharp, and the background in nicely out of focus so it doesn't intrude. The colour is very good even though uploading it to the blog has degraded it a bit; the colours in Cecil's original are more vibrant than they appear here. The only improvement I could suggest would be to clone away the nearly-in-focus stem on the right or, which might be even better, crop it off along with a bit of sky at the top.

This butterfly picture [I hope it is a butterfly and not a moth] has all the strengths of the bird one above, in that it has good colour, the subject is sharp, and it has an unobtrusive background. For me, the failing in the picture is the banana in the foreground, which is overly dominant in the frame and which and draws my eye every time. I think that the picture could be improved by cropping off most of the banana; a square crop would work quite well with this picture.

Food which distracts from the subject, is quite a common problem with wildlife pictures and I've seen it, for example, in insect pictures and in ones taken at vulture restaurants. I'd recommend that, when coming across an animal posing nicely [and that includes humans], you take the shot immediately because you might lose the opportunity if you faff about. Then, if you've got time, you can have a bash at improving the picture by re-framing it or changing your viewpoint.

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