Gentle Critique

Every few months the "Casual Meeting" with the photo club is all about critiquing images.  Everyone brings a few images that they'd like some advice or suggestions on and everyone discusses them.  It isn't as painful as it sounds - everyone is very nice.  :)

With the 365 project, I'm trying hard to "purposefully" (aka have an image in my mind before I take the picture) whenever I can.  With candid pictures this can be hard as you never know what your subject is going to do, but with stationary objects, you can set things up and try again and again until you get it right.

So I brought a few of my "purposefully" shot images last night to see what could be improved upon and I've got some before and after's to show you.

Basically for this one they suggested that the crop be narrower from top to bottom.  The fact that the two strong horizontal lines weren't both level didn't seem to really bother anyone other than me.  It was suggested that the slight angle to the dark area at the base of the bed was slanted in the "right" direction and if it had been slanted in the other direction it would have been a problem.  The horizontal lines could have also been straightened (apparently!) in post.  I may need to try that one day.

With Max's photo they thought the wood was too light on the right hand side and was distracting and that there was a bit of noise on Max as well.  So I fixed those up.  It was also suggested that a crop where he was more centred would have also worked but I liked this one too much to change it. (The slight difference in cropping below is just because of the collage program I was using... I couldn't get the dimensions quite right and I was getting tired of trying to make it perfect.)

This one had the most suggestions.  They would have liked to have seen more of my thumb, the bowl in it's entirety and have the edge of the table straight.  To help make the spoon pop more (and working with what we have) they suggested a much tighter crop on the right.  It definitely did bring up a more 3D effect!  Oh and the milk should be whiter. Next time I'll have to buy some cream or something.  ;)

It was an interesting and informative night.  It is nice to see other people's photos as well - what they were thinking when they took them and what else could have been done to improve them.  I also got an idea to try with the multiple exposure feature on my camera to fix a problem I was having and I might need to try an abstract multiple exposure with a flag today....  I'll post it if I do it!