Peacefulness
by sylvain15250

Comment:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

Someone really meant it when they said they had a house on the water, didn't they? :-) I love the tones here, the spectrum of blues is fantastic. Strong focal point, even though centred composition isn't my favourite, but some like the symmetry as evinced in the comments. I do agree that shooting with a smaller aperture would have given a much cleaner appearance here. That and some saturation in post to pop the blues without going too heavy handed would have helped greatly.

Hope this helps

Susan

Natural Waterfall
by outdoorphotography

Comment:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

First of all huge kudos to your model, what a trooper to put up with sitting in a waterfall and getting drenched. If this is for a model's port, I'd book her! The concept is great but execution is a little weak. While your composition is ok with a good use of thirds, that cut-off toe of both boots just drives me nuts. Don't know if you just shot really tight to the subject and forgot to include the feet, or if she lost them in post, but the result is very amateurish.

This pic has a lot of flaws that could have easily been fixed. First, shooting more frames may have given you a shot where her eye isn't blocked by water drops; your ISO looks a little high, I'm guessing you exposed for the water and not for her. So there is a ton of bleachiness going on both in the water and on her skin. Finally the overall image could use some saturation to pop the colours a little bit more.

Hope this has been helpful,

Susan

E P C O T
by Ja-9

Comment:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

Geodesic domes are always fun to see at nighttime as they are invariably lit up in some way to draw attention to them. Composition is interesting with the silhouetted palms and then the huge colourful dome behind them. Not cropped too closely and seeing that this was probably shot handheld, very good for 1/15th of a second. The pic itself is a nice informal study of the EPCOT Centre, but there just isn't a real wow factor here to captivate the voters.

Hope this has been helpful

Susan

city in dawn
by tigerluong

Comment:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

Very interesting POV of a dawn shot, as the sodium lights of the city blend in with the orange hues of dawn. However I can't tell if this is meant to be a shot of the sunrise/dawn, or a cityscape - it seems an uneasy marriage of the two. The horizon splits the image exactly in half, which gives it a bit of a staid, ho-hum quality.

It isn't a bad image but as commenters have already noted, less sky and more building might help to awe us with the skyline. Exposure is adequate, good to see you used a tripod and went for several seconds. I do like the hues and sense of a great city stirring, but feel that the composition is what's killing you here.

Hope this helps

Susan

Waiting For More Than 800 Pixels
by Dr.Confuser

Comment:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

Hmm....this is one of those pics that make you go...waitaminute...things look a little too perfect, a little too in place...then I saw your photog's notes and saw that you did indeed shoot a window display, someone else's work. The lighting has that peculiar flatness to it that you tend to see in store window displays, which was also a tip-off. I think the crop is a little tight and voters don't usually like portrait crops. The title is a little ambiguous too, which doesn't help.

Ok. Got that out of my system! This was a free study, so of course anything goes. The skeleton dominates the pic but the lanterns clustered around the head draw the eye away a bit, almost to the point of not noticing the pumpkin at the end of the arm. I like the fog effect. That, and a whole lotta dodge and burn, could have been put to use to maximize and minimize the impact of all the various elements here. And it all would have been legal under Advanced!

Hope this has been helpful

Susan

How I Spent My Summer Vacation
by Dr.Confuser

Comment:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

Compositionally this is an OK shot, with a nice colourful focal point shown in exquisite detail, even at an hour before or after high noon by the shadow.

This shot seems to me to be of two minds: is it a landscape shot, or a product shot? The bike is definitely a nice looking ride, as echoed by commenters, and the poppiness of the colour draws the eye to it immediately. But the rest of the scenery calls for attention too, though not as immediately as the bike does. Also the horizon is very close to a 50/50 split which further divides the attention. If you cover the bike and foreground, you have an entirely different shot; ditto if you block off the mountains.

I have to side with Jake (bdh) here. I can see you love both where you are, and your bike, but would like to see the bike positioned a little differently. Turning the bike around would also cast the shadow behind it and give it more of a sense of where it's been, than where it's going. Also, if you'd shot the bike from lower down so the mountains were looming behind it instead of beside it, I think you would have gotten a much stronger shot.

Hope this helps!

Susan

Mail in the Country
by Ivory

Comment:
love the mailbox post

the chase
by sidpixel

Comment:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

Great capture of a somewhat ominous racer in black chasing down the competition. I love in-camera techniques like panning and zoomblur, but sadly most voters seem to see both as the work of the devil. That's the only reason I can come up with as to why so many perfectly good images get voted down. The exposure is fine for a bike race in sunny olde England :-)

Voters also tend to dislike tight crops. I think your cyclist may have benefited from more space around your subject. Whom I like a lot; he dominates. Like that the pan trail behind him is shorter than the guy he's chasing down! And it's a Free Study, where anything goes, and oddly enough portraits and images of people tend to do poorly. Go figure.

Hope this has helped in some way,

Susan

Behind the music
by Pompouspete

Comment:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

I realize that this is an In the Style of...challenge, and those imnsho are by far the toughest ones here. You have to be able to look at someone else's work and try to get inisde their head in order to shoot and pp their work like they would. A pretty tall order especially as odriew has a style that uses a lot of post-processing and ambiguous, abstract figures and lots of negative space.

This image is ok for what it is, with decent exposure, but it's very tightly cropped and as it's shot from backstage and with the singer's face invisible to us, and not enough of her or her surroundings to see what's going on, it's a very tough image to get a connection with. It looks too much like a quick snap and not a thought-out composition, and the score reflects that.

Susan

Kite Capers
by Pangurban

Comment:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

Woohoo! Ellie, so glad to see you in the top ten with this image and even happier that some of my advice helped! You caught a very sweet and joyous moment here with mum and little boy both having a great time flying a kite. The kitestring leads us right to the heart of the action without distracting, and they're both having a great time and not noticing you at all. Simple and uncomplicated background, we see enough to get a sense of place and the ambient lighting shows us it's a nice sunny day.

Very, very glad and honoured that you set your inhibitions aside and took a chance. See how being sneaky can pay off? :-) Keep up the great work!

Susan