Qatar, critiquing the work of students
I have just returned from a wonderful trip to the Persian Gulf country of Qatar. Invited over by the American embassy, I spent a week giving photography lectures, attending the opening of an exhibit of my work in the capital of Doha, and teaching workshops in the Qatari desert. Most American don’t know much about Qatar–a very small country with very large reserves of petroleum. Qataris enjoy some things that would make Americans envious–very cheap gasoline, free cradle to grave health care, and free education through college level. They pay no taxes either. Also, though the U.S. State Department helped organize my trip, the Qatar government paid all my expenses and my honorarium, so the trip actually helped with our balance of trade and added nothing to the national debt. An added benefit for me was the warm weather, which was well worth the 20 hour flight. It’s nice work if you can get it.
As a confirmed desert rat, I have made many trips to the Middle East and have found the desert there to be almost as beautiful as ours. Middle Easterners also have a great interest in photography and in our deserts here in North America. I was amazed that most people in the photography community there knew my work and the work of American landscape photographers. They also had some very good camera gear.
In critiquing the work of my students there I saw the same sorts of things I see with aspiring photographers here. Here’s a list of compositional mistakes I always see that you might try to avoid:
Be careful with white areas or subjects, since the eye is invariably drawn to those first. This is especially problematic when your main subject is not white.
Watch the corners of your image. Unwanted twigs or other flotsam and jetsam want to creep into those areas to ruin your image.
Get closer to your subject, either with a longer lens, or actually moving in closer.
Watch your horizon line. Less experienced photographers tend to put the horizon right across the middle of the image–a psychologically disturbing practice.If you’re including foreground, spend some time to find a good one.
If you’re including sky, don’t waste 1/3 of the image space with bald blue sky. Also, avoid large areas of deep black.
Try to find some way to simulate three-dimensions in your big vistas. Two ways to do this are to use layers of subject matter and to use shadows. Shadowed areas translate best with the sun at right angles to your shot.
Probably the best shot I got on the trip was a panoramic image I made near my hotel. From my seventh floor room I could see a parking lot flooded from recent very rare rains. I determined that at sunrise, Doha’s skyline ( reminiscent of Blade Runner) would make a great reflection scene. Unfortunately my tripod, lost with my luggage, hadn’t arrived yet. Fortunately, I had my new Nikon 18-200 zoom lens with second generation Vibration Reduction technology. The lens was recently tested and shown to have four stops of shake control, even in the hands of a geezer photographer. I had previsualized the image well, and was wide awake from jet lag at the next dawn.
I did several regular images and then tried a hand held panoramic shot with three images. The new Photoshop CS3 has an amazing Photomerge feature that have been using to make panoramic images. Photomerge is so good that I’ve probably given up my six pound Fuji 6×17 film panoramic camera forever. It’s easy to use. After shooting your segments in the field, export them into Photoshop. Go to file and choose the Automate command and Photomerge. In Photomerge choose the Browse command and select your images, and sit back and watch the thing do its magic. You can see my unedited pano 
here.Qatar also has an arch. 
Just one.
