Hi Annette!
Thanks for submitting assignment 3.
I’m going to assume your first two photographs are you shallow depth of field images and your last image is you motion image.
The goal of using a technique like shallow depth of field is to focus the viewers eye on one part of the image. It’s just one of many creative tools that photographers have in their tool-belt if you will.
If you have a scene that is cluttered up and you need to clean it up a little you can you use shallow depth of field to do so.
It’s almost a cheat because what we’re trying to do is emulate how our eyes naturally do this when we focus on certain objects.
If you observe how your eye’s automatically make the background out of focus when you look at an object you’ll see how this works.
With the background blurry our attention is on the object and we can ‘focus’ on it if you will.
In your first image you have almost isolated the flower in the center of the frame but the other flowers are also still in focus and as such they are drawing my attention away.
The second photograph of the glass also has a few minor issues despite the fact that it’s a nice image.
The main problem with this image is that the color of the leaves in the background and the flowers in the foreground are so powerful that that overwhelm the image. Given that I’m not even really looking at the glass which is the only element in focus. A solution to this would be to simplify the background and foreground and just feature the glass, if that’s what you want to feature.
Like this:
[attachment=1:3hht26ny]glass-1.jpg[/attachment:3hht26ny]
Photo by jurvetson
or like this:
[attachment=0:3hht26ny]glass-2.jpg[/attachment:3hht26ny]
Photo by Kyle May
I think you get my drift. Sometimes color can get in the way. In this instance those colors overpowered your main element.
Now onto the motion image. You have shot a horse jumping a fence and this photograph clearly shows motion so job well done!
I’m usually not a fan of having the main subject in the frame be the blurry part so I usually like to use the panning technique while shooting such that I match the speed of the moving object and allow the bkg to blur out.
Like this:
[attachment=2:3hht26ny]example-of-panning-in-photography.jpg[/attachment:3hht26ny]
Photo by willvision
Also in this case part of me wants to see what the horse is actually jumping over. So showing the bar itself would improve this type of image specifically.
Overall you’ve done well on your third assignment although I would have liked your depth of field images to be stronger.
I look forward to seeing your work on assignment 4!
Btw, are you the Annette I met in Australia? I mention it because I met someone named Annette recently and she said she would probably take the course.