Greetings from the Critique Club:
First entry eh? Well there's a lot that you've got right here and some stuff that could be a lot better.
The good stuff: your colour picks here are bang on, those reds, oranges and yellows are a perfect match for the challenge. You also used the light really well, it make the flowers glow. Your exposure too is pretty good I think.
The stuff that could be better. Unedited..... never going to cut it challenge-wise unless it is a minimal editing challenge, then it's straight out of the camera for all of us. Here the off verticals cry out to be straightened and your flowers are undersold against a fairly dull backdrop - straighten and crop as a minimum; find the area of optimal interest and crop to that. Also, try to think how this looks on the screen... we only get 800 X 800 pixels to play with so every move from a square crop diminishes what you can show. Now, I definitely not advocating you always enter square cropped images but you should always ask yourself what parts of the image outside of a square crop contribute positively to the impact of the image. Try straightening and then cropping this image to the bottom right corner so that you bottom edge intersects where the shadow meets the edge of the shelf, then the left edge of the image along the line of the edge of the frame just outside the petals of the left flower and then across the top just above the upper flower. I imagine that will make more of what you've got. Or, if you want to keep the context of the window (and I can see how you might, crop it half way between the flower and the top of the image. As you lose height, you'll gain width making the flowers more prominent.
I can think of other stuff I'd do in the edit, but for the most part they require dedicated software - if you don't have any you'll need to get some if you want to approach the quality of the images you see on the front page.
I'll leave it at that for now - good luck with future challenges
Paul |
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
