To hold is to comfort. To comfort is to love.
by Simms

Comment:
Hey there from the Critique Club

Camera Work/Technical: This is a hard photo to pull off. I do like your depth of field use here, but everything still blends together. These colors are tough to capture, especially when lit this harshly.

Lighting: Your lighting is very harsh. This created some deep shadows that lost a great deal of detail. You did a nice job not blowing the highlights, unfortunately that darkened the shadows even more.

Composition/Content: The frame also looks cluttered the way you cropped off the animal on the right, as well as the way you have the foot touching the bottom.

My Opinion: I think that this one scored very well, most likely on the cute factor. While the image is nice for what it is, shooting at a different time of day would only make it stronger.

Eric

Inverno
by tate

Comment:
The colors that you captured are tremendous, but the sky is a bit too bright for your subject. My eye is drawn directly to the washed out portion of the sky and held there. Perhaps a graduated ND filter would have helped and made this one near-flawless. Even positioning the ice spire more over teh bright spot would have helped a bit.

Mother and Son
by dahved

Comment:
Hey there from the Critique Club

Camera Work/Technical: My eyes are immediately drawn to the catchlights in the child's eyes, which is initially a good thing, but the catch lights give the image an overall out-of-focus feeling, as do the other highlights on the image. This may have been a result of your post-processing. I have found, through much trial and more error, that a better result is usually yielded by running Neat Image before any sharpening is done. I'd also like to see a little more contrast to the image.

Lighting: Nicely lit, but I'd like to see the entire catch light in the child's right eye instead of it bleeding to the edge of his eyelid. I do like your use of lighting to isolate the child from the mother, thus making him the emphasized subject.

Composition/Content: I believe that your composition would be stronger if you had left his ear in the frame or either cropped a little closer to his eye.

My Opinion: Excellent job meeting the challenge. I definitely get a feeling of love as soon as the image loads. I think with more crisp focus and a little more contrast, this one would have finished even better.

Eric

"I love a sunburnt country"
by super-dave

Comment:
Hey there from the Critique Club

Camera Work/Technical: Superb. Your colors are vivid, hinting that your white balance was properly chosen and adjusted, and your focus is nice and crisp. Your depth of field use nicely isolates the droplets while still allowing us to feel what you have in your background.

Lighting: Your lighting is also very nice. You have achieved a very nice, evenly lit image with no blown highlights or detail loss to shadows.

Composition/Content: I agree with you that a smaller flag would have worked much better, or perhaps moving the glass farther from the flag when shooting.

My Opinion: I am sure that it is me missing something, but I don't understand the title. Also, I just don't get the feeling of love jumping out at me when the image loads. While the score is on the high side of average and the image is well-done from a technical standpoint, I think that this type of refraction image is a bit overdone. While refraction is a valuable tool in the photography tool chest, the ongoing struggle for us photographers is finding new and creative ways to photograph refraction. This one in particular is too much of an emulation of Setzler's "Liberty and Justice" from 2002. I added it to my favorites back in April of 2006.


Eric

Push
by jenesis

Comment:
Very nice. I love that texture!

Carroll Street Delivery
by elemess

Comment:
I think this one was a bit underscored. I like your point of view, and I love the composition. This is exactly what I think of in a street scene. It does look a little washed out, though. I think a curves adjustment would have fixed that right up, though. Still, very nice work.

Inner Glow
by pix-al

Comment:
I like this type of shot a lot, as the lighting potential with these is endless. You produced some terrific color here, but the hot spot on the center of the ice is too strong. It grabs my eye and just holds it there. I did a similar shot, and I'll give you a not so secretive secret. Light it from the bottom. I punched a hole in a black cloth, put in on some glass, set the ice of the hole and put the flash under the table. The ice lit much more evenly, and without so much of a hot spot. Great start, and nice job meeting the challenge.

An Icy Discourse
by Jaded_Housewife

Comment:
You had a great start with this one and it had amazing potential, in my opinion. I really, really like the strength in the horizontal and vertical lines that you captured. From the ice storage machines to the wall to the building in the background, all these play well in taking my eye and gently leading it through the frame. The gentleman on the phone adds nice depth to the image, as well as adds a potentially interesting story. It makes me wonder who he's talking to and why he isn't using his mobile phone. Everyone has those these days, right? So, what prevents this one from being great? In my opinion, its the darn truck filling up the empty space in the background. It causes a distracting highlight that this one just doesn't need. Still, a nice image, but I think I'd try to get out to re-shoot it without that truck there. I may also crop the right side of the frame right up to the ice storage machine, but I'd have to play with it to be sure. From me, a score of 6. Without the truck, an easy 8.

Direction
by Giorgio

Comment:
I like your general composition, but the car in the background makes the frame feel very crowded. I am not very fond of your choice in post-processing here. In my little opinion, the object of post-processing is to make the capture look more natural, more as the eye would interpret it. Here, your choice to highlight the gentleman on the right hurts the overall image. It draws my eye directly to him and the darkness in the remainder of the frame prohibits my eye from exploring. I like a photo that draws me in and leaves me looking for more. This one draws me to the one subject and then my eye notices the irregularities of the dodging you used. Great start, but I think its just over-processed.

Trouble
by Gatorguy

Comment:
Nice color and terrific, crisp focus, but I can't tell what's going on in this shot. I can tell that the two are teens or just before teen, and, by the title, I assume that they are up to no good. Beyond that, it is really hard to tell what the duo is up to. Your composition is also a bit cramped, with both of your subjects crammed too close to your frame edges. Its also a bit awkward slicing off the right-hand subject's shadow the way you cropped it. Great start, and I like the square crop, but I'd like to know more about this one at first glance.