Zulu Warrior
by rossl

Comment by ericwoo:
Hey there from the Critique Club

First of all, welcome to the wonderful world of DPC. I think that you'll really like what you find here. An average of 5.333 is a pretty strong place to start, and it leaves a great deal of room for improvement.

Camera Work/Technical: It looks like you had to rely too heavily on flash here, thus giving the image a very flattened look. I understand that night time photography can be pretty difficult.

Lighting: Your lighting is a bit flat. It almost looks like your camera was pointed down when shot this one, as the legs and feet are better lit than his face or torso.

Composition/Content: I'd like to see the entire fore in this one. I think that backing away a bit to loosen up the composition would help out some. That may also help even out your flash a bit as well.

My Opinion: Nice work meeting the challenge, and I look forward to more entries, as well as seeing your overall average climb. Again, welcome and keep shooting.

Thank you for the opportunity to provide a critique on your entry,
Eric

Zulu Warrior
by rossl

Comment by xianart:
a good start to your dpc addiction!

is this shakaland, in eshowe? my husband is a banana boy, from durban and general kzn.

good shot. it might have been better if you had tried without flash - although i'm not sure if your camera does it. that would have given you more blur, but could have been very dramatic. the problem with on-camera flash is that the light tends to fall off, as you see here in the upeer portion of the image.

but, taking your image as it is here, what would i do with it? probably run it through some noise rduction software. sometimes noise works really well, but here it may be just distracting. thendo some screen (lighter) and multiply (darker) layers (all this is in photoshop. if you have something else, i'm sure there are similar things you can do in that program) there's a tutorial here for layer masks, as well as a whole bunch of other useful tips on processing.

here's a quick and sloppy rework - i know i've destroyed the heat shimmers - that would take a lot more work to bring out! possible, but not in 5 minutes! this isn't legal in basic, but gives a sense of what can be done.


keep shooting!