Trains & Planesby
biggood53Comment by jadin: -Critque Club comment-
Compositon:
I love the composition in this photo. Your eyes move all over the photo just by where you placed everything. For starters you try to look at what the child is looking at. You also look at the child himself, from his (assuming a boy) arms propping him up, but especially down to his feet dangling in the air. Way to capture children's fascination with airplanes. Is that a toy train below him to boot? Nice little addition for a plane, train, challenge :D
Lighting:
The lighting as you said is 'against the light'. It looks a tad overexposed, but nothing you can't fix in editing. Perhaps shooting earlier in the morning while the sun is still rising would give you warmer and softer light. As it is, the light is harsh. A little adjustment of brightness and contrast could make up for that fairly easily.
Technical:
The photo appears to have been in focus when you took it. However, it seems you enlarged(?) a crop of a bigger file, the result is it is extremely pixelated, which is highly distracting. Instead of looking at the dangling feet, you look at the jagged blotches of artifacting in the fence. (more in post-processing)
Post-Processing:
This is where the photo lacks. If you enlarged this from a wider photo, your resizing was either too much for your camera, or the way you resized it made it lose a ton of quality. (looking at your other photos, they look fine in this regard) I'd recommend looking at your resize settings and making sure they are set correctly. Look at this
tutorial on resizing for least amount of impact on your photos.
If you have the original file of this, I'd strongly recommend starting over with it and making your adjustments with keeping the quality in mind.
If the artifacting is from saving, remember to save your master in a lossless format such as tagged image file format (tif) or photoshop (psd). Both will allow you to work on your file and save whenever you want without losing quality. When saving a jpeg more than once, parts of the photo is lost each and every save. Eventually resulting in what you have here. Save in jpeg only after all your editing is complete. Also you can usually change the amount of quality lost for jpeg's, check your settings to make sure it isn't too much.
Overall:
You have a superb photo here. It just needs better editing and or quality control. Starting fresh with the original and working to preserve quality, could leave you with a very nice photo indeed. Keep up the excellent work.
Message edited by author 2004-06-24 02:13:06. 
Photographer found comment helpful.
