Wintry Wheatgrassby
scoxComment by Citadel: Greetings from the Critique Club and congrats on entering your first Challenge!
My first impression of this image unfortunately is the missed focus. My advice to remedy this? Well...shoot a lot. Shoot everything and anything. Fill up a card and just practise using your camera's auto focus. Get a feel of how to get your camera to focus exactly where you want it. Open up the pictures when you get home and see how you did. The side benefit of doing this is that if you get to shoot that once in a lifetime shot and you only have a fraction of a second to bring the viewfinder to your eye, frame the shot, get focus and fire you'll be ready.
The other thing to try is to use a bit more depth of field. Using a smaller aperture like f/8 would bring more of the scene into focus while leaving the background blurred out nicely. A large aperture (remember that smaller numbers for aperture mean a wider aperture) will get less depth of field which can be helpful but in cases like this less of your subject is in sharp focus.
The composition is okay but it just doesn't feel entirely planned. The top of the grass has been cut off and I don't believe that's intentional. I do like that you placed the grass on the one side and used the background fence to balance out the image.
In terms of the challenge? I can see it but I don't believe its the strongest subject for the challenge. Voters unfortunately like to be beaten over the head with the obvious. The less mental hurdles the better. (We voters aren't that bright remember). Still, it wasn't totally unrelated and given the time of year its pretty tough to do better.
Overall it was a good scene to shoot and definitely worth exploring. You did pretty good on your first challenge. good luck on your next one!
Photographer found comment helpful.
