Deconstruction (Falls)by
RikkiComment: My first impression is that this picture did, indeed, get scored lower than it deserved. I think there's a perfectly good explanation why, which I'll take a shot at shortly--
The colors, especially in the sky, are good, and the rest of your color scheme (grey, brown, green) fits together well. The shapes are interesting, and there is good texture detail in the darker areas.
On the critical side, as some have noted, the kids stick out in this picture and distract from the architecture. As the kids are clearly not the purpose of the picture and they don't really add to it, they don't belong there. The highlights in this picture have suffered a lot of detail loss from either the glare of the sun or the post-processing, with the end result being areas of rather harsh brightness with little visual interest.
Now my shot at an explanation, and some suggestions thrown in with it--
I urge you to remember that votes are given one by one, and each person has to look at this photograph and give it a whole-number vote. This is admittedly woefully imprecise in many cases, but it's what we're stuck with. The most common votes are always 4, 5, and 6; roughly speaking, they stand for "bad, average, good." Voters give out more of these three numbers than anything else.
The bell curve of votes on this picture is skewed heavily towards 5, which is statistically interesting. If this were a more classically formed bell curve, a fair chunk of the 5 votes should be more or less equally distributed between 4 and 6. It will be useful to explore why the votes that one would probabilistically expect to fall on 4 and 6 instead fell on 5.
I'm going to imagine myself as a "typical voter," as much as I can do so. Okay, so I'm voting on the High Contrast entries, and yours comes up. I think,
does it meet the challenge? Yes, sure does, plenty of contrast here, no doubt about it. Then:
Does this photograph stand out to me? Sort of, the sky is better than most, but otherwise the picture is much like many others, and the bright spots are a little too bright.
Again, remember that most votes are in the 4 to 6 range. That your picture clearly meets the challenge and has a good sky kept most people from classing your photo "bad" (4), though its flaws also kept them from classing it "good" (6). Then the only remaining option is 5.
I bet if there were a 5.5 vote, you'd have gotten a lot of those. That would have been more reflective of its photographic merit, I think, but between the choice of 5 and 6, it looks like most would give it a 5.
My suggestion: keep this, the sociological background of DPC scores, in mind when you're choosing what to submit. Think about what it takes to get a voter to click "6" instead of "5." Look at the images that score close to 6, and see what's done differently there. Let me give you an example from my own recent work:
Note that the peak on my graph is at 6, with more 6's than one would statistically expect. I took this photo with the intent of getting exactly that effect--a lot of votes of 6--rather than trying to take a "10" photo. My thinking was that if I have strong colors and good lighting, a lot of people will see it as generically "good" and vote me above 5 even if they don't really like the photo.
I hope this is helpful :)
Photographer found comment helpful.
