Into the Sea of words
by Willtorecord

Comment:
Compression artifacts and halos from sharpening are clearly visible in this image, which detracts from an otherwise solid shot. Selecting an area of interest and cropping more tightly would have removed a lot of the high-contrast edges (one of the factors which will cause a jpeg to quickly increase in size) and allowed you to use a lower compression.

table for two
by Riponlady

Comment:
The illumination here is odd, as though you played with the curves a bit too much and then oversharpened. The light in this scene exceeds the dynamic range of your camera; a tighter crop which focused on the table would have helped. A polarizing filter would have cut through the glare on the glass and allowed the painting to be visible to the camera.

Coffee & Sugar
by EllieNeufer

Comment:
While the white background is okay, the sugar has crossed the line between high-key and overexposed. In general I think if you have to include text to make your image work, you should probably reconsider your approach to the subject. This might have been more interesting if it was more minimalistic; a B&W shot of a single coffee bean half-buried in the sugar, for instance.

Caffeine Crazed Individuals
by Montereykiddo

Comment:
I would like this better if it either looked less posed or of it was hammed up quite a bit more. As it is, the model doesn't seem quite committed enough to conveying the necessary mood for this to work as well as it might.

Waking Up With Red
by rasdub

Comment:
I think that this may have been stronger if everything to the right of the word "java" was cropped out, and more space given either to the sky above or the bridge to the left.

Sugar Packets
by Di

Comment:
Nothing in this image seems to be in sharp focus. With such a narrow DoF this is particularly important.

The USA...Today
by tfarrell23

Comment:
This is nicely done, but the back 2/3rds of the image seems rather crowded, while the front is entirely empty. I think that either cropping out the dead space, or moving the paper down to the bottom edge would help this feel much more balanced.

Madrid Eclipse Morning
by JH

Comment:
I'd like this a lot better if I had a stronger impression of what the figure in the background was like. While the person does make this more interesting, the extreme emphasis that the DoF places on that ubiquitous logo makes this look more like a piece of Starbucks promotional material than a photo most people would choose to look at. The logo is so large that I think that the DoF could be placed a bit farther back in the image and still keep the text legible. If the focus fell on a pencil poised over a piece of paper, a stack of textbooks, or a pair of reading glasses on the table in front of the figure this would have a lot more character.

"4 on the Floor"
by tmorninglory96

Comment:
The B&W treatment does a good job of highlighting the texture in this shot, but I'm afraid that a lot of your texture is in the background, so your intended subject looks relatively flat and uninteresting. The thick border does a nice job of emphasizing the subject. The different shades of the coffee and the contrasting cups are a nice touch, but I think that it'd be more interesting if you added something to the cups to give them interest (e.g. a sugar cube floating in one, a sprig of mint in another, a cinnamon stick in the third, and a spoon in the fourth). The different cups and colors suggest similar variety in their users; seeing the hands of the drinkers might make this an interesting character study.

Whole Lotta Shakin' Gone On
by GeneralE

Comment:
I'm not entirely sure what this is, but I'm not a coffee drinker, so I may just be unfamiliar with this device. I think the shot would have been more interesting if you'd have cropped the image to focus on the wavy rings around the vertical bar on the right, removing everything but this and the surrounding chrome. This would have rendered the image more abstract and minimalistic. which I like, but often isn't well received by the voters here.