It may not be the best picture in the world, but it is hard to get a decent landscape when your surrounded by nothing but flat land, farm land and cattle feedlots. This picture is of my home town Alden, KS population as of 2009, 154.
I have not edited this picture to make it look more appealing and I can't and borders unless I do it in my photoshop program. Yet that would be classified as added objects since I have to use my brush tool and border brush sets to do a border. The only editing was to resize it to be no bigger then the max pixels in the rules.
Statistics
Place: 368 out of 382 Avg (all users): 4.3709 Avg (commenters): 3.8333 Avg (participants): 4.3861 Avg (non-participants): 4.3400 Views since voting: 761 Views during voting: 242 Votes: 151 Comments: 8 Favorites: 0
You checked the box looking for a critique on your image and it was allocated to me in the critique club. I notice you have not had a critique from the critique club before, so I hope you are prepared to take my comments in the spirit in which they are intended ie, to be helpful to you so you can maybe do better next time.
I also noted that you say you couldn't add a border in photoshop and stay within the rules. There are many ways to add a border, there is even a tutorial on DPC showing how to do it so it is legal even in basic. The steps to add text are obviously not legal for challenges, but the border part is.
Turning to the image critique and reasons why this may have scored as low as it did.
Composition First of all, the subject matter itself is not boring, but could have been presented a bit better which would have made a difference.
When shooting a subject like this, try not to put the horizon bang in the centre. If the sky has interesting cloud patterns etc, try and shoot so you get more sky and less foreground. If, as on the day you shot this, the sky is a bit bland, then aim to get more foreground in the image and less sky. By doing this the image already looks a bit more interesting.
Secondly, try not to put the buildings in the centre of the image. Try taking the shot again, but stand more to the left (or right). I think having the buildings to the left of centre would make a more interesting image.
Technical As a couple of people commented during the challenge, the overall feel of the image is that it is a little soft. Meaning either it is slightly out of focus, or there is some slight camera shake.
It could also be due to the ISO you used. I am not sure if you used ISO 1600 by mistake (ie your camera was set to that after a previous shooting session) or if you intended it to be used, but for a daylight picture I think ISO 1600 is not really necessary and could certainly account for some of the softness in the image. If you reduced the ISO to ISO 200 you would have minimised the amount of digital noise (grain) in the image. If you kept the aperture value at F9 and reduced the ISO to 200, this would have given you a shutter speed still plenty fast enough to expose the scene correctly, minimising the handheld effect (mostly a shutter speed of 1/60 with that lens is enough to avoid too much camera shake). I definitely think the sharpness of the image was affected by the very high ISO.
Processing Based on your comments in the notes section, I assume you shot this in B&W in the camera. You mention you do not really do any editing in PS. I think it is OK to do some small adjustments, especially for a B&W challenge. I think you would have achieved a more punchy B&W image by shooting in colour and converting in Photoshop (or whichever software you use). There are many ways to convert to B&W but even just a basic desaturation followed by a levels adjustment layer could have helped give a more contrasty B&W image.
I would also recommend you pay a little bit of attention to details. There are two spots at the top of the frame. They could easily be birds, but they do not add anything to the image. You could easily have cropped them out.
Also, as far as processing goes, I really think a little bit of sharpening (using the Unsharp Mask in photoshop) would have helped this image.
Despite what you may think based on my comments, I did actually like this image and gave it a 6 in voting.
Summary
Overall I think just by some small changes to your composition and a little bit of processing you could actually have bumped the score up quite a bit, at least more towards a 5 than a 4.
Try not to feel limited by your environment, you have great subject matter on your doorstep. Look at other photos taken in the same area of similar landscapes. I get so much inspiration from what other people have shot. Flickr is a good place to start looking. I found this group when I was looking earlier and thought there are some lovely images
I think this photo would have been better if the silos were off centered more and the horizon wasn't centered vertically on this photo. hope this helps.
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