Simple Machines
by troylox

Comment:
Conceptually pleasing. It would rank higher if it had the critical sharpness it's just begging for, and if the lighting were a little softer. I'd also question the very warm chromatics here. I wonder how it would work if the drivers were cool-ble-steel looking and the rest a more desaturated sepiaesque tone?

Retired
by scrum8

Comment:
extraordinary positive/negative dialogue; first the BG is UP, then the BG is DOWN, it cycles visually. I wish there were better separation between the teeth and the drak BG stripe. A real sleeper of an image.

Prybar
by GeneralE

Comment:
I admire this for the very fundamental take on what it means to be mechanical; a prybar is the original machine, aka "lever". The foreground leaf reall distracts, and I wish the image were more dynamic.

"Hidden Face"
by tfarrell23

Comment:
I really don't see a face here, except maybe a squinting one on the big rock, not really "trhere" for me...

Ent of Fangorn
by scrum8

Comment:
It's a nice face, but the background is way too confusing and cluttered to show the face to best advanhtage.

Lighting The Way
by atsxus

Comment:
***CRITIQUE CLUB RESPONSE***

Compositionally, there's nothing much to quibble with here; 1/2 degree counterclockwise rotation would square up the verticals nicely.
Likewise, the decorations themselves seem "photographable" for sure.

Your problems are technical. "Lights at night" are hard to do well. If you cruise the results of this challenge, you'll see that most of the similar entrants ran into the same problem you did: amorphous black surround with dots of lights popping out. What's the best way around it? Shoot at twilight, in early evening, get some detail in the sky so it's not totally black. A few of the night-light entrants managed this very well.

There's evidently at least one tree, left-center in front of the house. If this tree were separated from a slightly less-dark sky, you'd have a vastly improved image.

At the photoshop level, this might benefit from some fiddling withhue/saturation sliders as well, to get some more chromatic pop. Give it a try...

Robt.

Liberty & Justice, Great Briton Edition.
by marbo

Comment:
***CRITIQUE CLUB RESPONSE***

There's really not much I can say about this image except "well done!" The score says the rest, and I quite agree it's a top-10 image in the deja vu challenge. I went to the original, and I think this is a fabulous variation on it.

One thing I noticed is that the original is more "linear", where yours has a "zoom-out_ effect, with the zoom popping down to the crossed-bars center of your image. It may not be intentional, but it's a nice subtle metaphor; UK is an island, a focused place so to speak, where USA is a sprawling, linear kind of place. So that's good.

If I had any suggestion for improvement, it might be to try cleaning up the whites a little bit with curves. I'd like to see how this worked witha little more pop int he tonal range. But that's a nit. Good job!

Robt.

Holiday decorations on sale...
by nolock

Comment:
***CRITIQUE CLUB RESPONSE***

There's a considerable charm to this image. The contrast between the pop-eyed santa and the grumpy santa is especially amusing. Nevertheless, nothing in the image elevates it beyond the "snapshot" stage for me, or apparently for the voters. Before addressing this picture individually, I'd comment in passing that your "best" shot might have been to zero in on the 2 santas and play them off against each other for comic effect.

That said, there are a couple things working against this particular image. Most obvious is the extreme yellow cast of the lighting; you almost certainhly used daylight white balance, and tungsten white balance was called for here: daylight is MUCH more blue than tungsten light. (Tungsten light, in case you don't know, is what ordinary lightbulbs throw; also called incandescent light, it is derived by heating a tungsten filament so radically that it glows, and it's VERY warm light) In any case, you can (and should) use any image editing programs color blance controls to neutralize the whites here. Thast would help a lot.

Another problem witht he image is the noticeably skewed "architectural" elements. You fixated on the horizontal molding at top and rotated camera so that was true horizontal, but in so doing you threw the verticals way off, and also further skewed the less-visible horizontal elements at the bottom of the scene. Optimally, the camera would be vertically squarted up for this shot and the the horizontal lines would be true horizontal only in center of image, with upper ones slanting down and across from upper right, and lower ones up and across from lower right.

Or, better yet, you could move the camera POV more to the left so the entire image were more in elevation instead of zooming off to a left-placed vanishing point. This would mean removing the handwritten sighn, but this should have been done anyway ont he image as we see it now, as it's another distracting aspect of the shot.

Finally, it looks to me as if there's a bunch more interesting stuff lopped off at the bottom, and a lot of what's on the top is pretty much wasted image space. I can see why you cropped the way you did, wanting to see the entire loop of the bell-chains (or whatever they are), and I respect that, but it might work better if we had more of the interesting stuff in foreground.

Still, like I say, I think your "shot" might be to focus in on the 2 faces, not go for the overall picture...

Happy New year!

Robt.

Peace on ...
by GeneralE

Comment:
The moon is precisely in the vertical center of the image right now and the entire left side of the image is just negative blue space. If the moon were out a ways, not too far, and (IMO, but less importantly, up a little) I think there'd be a tad more dynamic flow to this image.

It's hard to explain; it's like, right now, I can't tell from the image itself if the moon was an accident, you know?

Actually, now that I think of it, out and down a tad might work better. Why not do a couple variations in photoshop? Select the moon and some sky with the circle marquee and paste it, use the clone tool to cover the "real" moon with sky on the base layer, then use the arrows to drag the moon layer around to different places and see how it looks. You can scale it up and down too, see what possibilities might have existed with a different lens, etc.

I may be wrong about all this, I often am.

(robt)

TIME IN MOTION
by DDYJR

Comment:
A nice shot. The hot, over-warm "arch" upper left is unfortunately a real eyetrap here.