Photo Critiques – Week 4

A couple of weeks ago I offered to critique photos of members of the Learning Photography with Neil Creek Flickr group. It’s a little late, but here’s my first go. The purpose here is to try and help people improve their photography and processing of photos.

I want to make it clear from the start, however, that I am not an expert, and what you see here is only my opinion. There is nothing that makes my opinion intrinsically more valuable or important than anyone else’s. I have been shooting and processing digital photos for several years now, and I’ve learned a lot in that time. Just because I dislike something in a particular photo, however, doesn’t mean that anyone else would or should. So please just take what I say as a personal opinion and nothing more.

Table with a View

by jordesign

I like this shot a lot. The big sky with interesting clouds is really the focus, along with the sweeping view. The table makes the scene personal, and invites the viewer to put themselves in the scene. The composition is strong, rightly emphasising the sky, and giving the land just enough space. I also like the off-centre positioning of the table.

There are a few problems however. Overall the photo is too dark and lacking in contrast. The table is almost lost in the darkness, as is the mid-ground landscape. The observation dome is too close to the edge of the frame, and looks like it’s being pushed out, without room for itself. The cars on the right a a bit distracting too. Not much can be done about the dome without re shooting, but I had a go at processing the photo to help the other issues.

Below are the processes I applied to the photo.

• Levels adjustment
• Shadows/highlights
• Increased saturation
• Edited cars out with cloning tool
• Unsharp mask with large radius for local contrast enhancement
• Resize and smart sharpen for export

Belle

by marcusg

Another good photo with potential. This is not your typical pet photo, and it puts you in her world by getting down low at her level. The action is great, and I like the positioning of Belle on the right third line, and the interesting texture of the surface she’s on.

The main problem here though, is the obvious motion blur. Just before I talk about that, a couple of other nits to pics: the sky is over exposed, though that can be hard to avoid; and poor Belle’s head is chopped a little too much, again hard to avoid in an action shot. The motion blur really hurts this photo though, especially because it’s her eyes that are out of focus. In the future, try using a faster shutter speed, compensating by opening up the aperture, or increasing the ISO. Also, try tracking her eyes as you move the camera with her. You can forgive motion blur everywhere else, except the eyes.

I couldn’t help myself and tweaked this one a little as well.

Below are the processes I applied to the photo.

• Levels adjustment to improve the contrast a little
• Shadow/highlights to pull a bit more detail and colour from the sky
• Resize and apply reasonably heavy smart sharpening to try and help the blur a little

Pikes Peak

by dldailey32

It’s hard to pic fault with this photo. I like the warm colour palette, the central composition works well due to the reflection, the low angle sun adds great detail to the mountain peaks, and the multiple layers add depth.

A few minor details that could perhaps be improved: the horizon seems slightly tilted, and that puts me off a little right away; the central band of trees is very dark, and hard to see any detail; the full sized version seems to have a lot of jpeg artifacts throughout, like noise; and perhaps it could do with a little bit of brightening. I hardly did anything to this photo.

Below are the processes I applied to the photo.

• Rotated and cropped to fix horizon
• Adjusted levels to brighten slightly
• Used shadows/highlights to bring out a bit of detail in the trees
• Bumped up the saturation slightly

Go with the flow..

by CW Ye

This image has given me a lot of problems, but not because it’s a bad photo. In fact it’s great! It has a very interesting subject, a great repeating geometric pattern, and clever perspective that leads the eye into the photo. But something about it doesn’t seem quite right and I can’t put my finger on it…

I think that the contrast is a bit high, with blown highlights and no detail in the darkest shadows, but that’s a minor issue. I think the main issue I have is that there’s not a single point of focus for the eye to look at. The white links are obvious attention-getters, but there’s two very bold sections that are white, and they compete with each other for attention. The top one is awkwardly placed and throws the image out of balance somewhat, and the bottom one almost leads my eye back out of the composition at the bottom. If it was possible and I could re shoot the shot, I would have recomposed it so that only the top white section was visible, and had it entering the photo at the bottom right and leaving on the bottom of the left edge, making a triangular cut through the image.

I’m sorry I can’t be any clearer, but this is one of those “SO close but not sure why” photos.

Below are the processes I applied to the photo.

• Cropped to a much tighter composition
• Tweaked the shadows/highlights
• Resized and smart sharpened slightly

Offering your photo for critique

If you’ve read the previous critiques, and would like to have your photos critiqued as well, then please submit them to the LPNC group pool, and add the tag lpnccritiquew6 to the photo. I’ll try to critique three to five photos per week, but depending on my time and the number of submissions, it may be less regular than that.

If you would like the opinion of other members of the blog’s Flickr group, please feel free to post your photo to the discussion and ask for critiques. You’ll probably find some willing people there happy to help.

I hope that some of you find this helpful!