Life in Bloomfield by
mrsmcharrisComment by snaffles: Greetings from the Critique Club!
Hmm this photo needs a lot of work. But first and foremost, the one and only rule that really matters here in the very, very, VERY tough realm of competitive photography?
READ. THE. RULES. I cannot stress this enough. And this challenge description had a cute li'l yellow flag icon next to it, which means that there is an extra rule in place that MUST be heeded if anyone's going to give your image a second look. In this case, that meant that you had to title your image 'Aftermath'. No ands, ifs or buts about it. It's right there. You got many low votes, and most would be due to this alone. At best, I would I have given this image a 5 for at least making an effort; but as is I would have given it a 3.
Now, onto the image itself. I won't call it a photograph, because to me a photograph is an image into which some thought and knowledge was put, and it shows.
This is only a snapshot, shot on the fly without any attention being paid to the basics. It looks like it was shot during lunch hour with a cellphone. The quality is extremely poor - see the jagged edges around the subject's head? - you get those artefacts when something with a very low mp range was used to take this image, then the image was blown up. The bleached-out white section that is almost all the whole lower and right side of the frame means no attention was paid to trying to compensate for the strong overhead sun. The photo should have been straightened, a level horizon somewhere to give the viewer a sense of equilibrium. Even just ensuring that the window sills in the bg were level would have helped out somewhat.
Which is sad, because if you knew what you were doing, this could have been a very strong image. Most street photogs coming across this person could have built an entire story around this, using only things like different angles and adjusting their settings accordingly to suit the subject.
Sorry to be so harsh in this instance, but at times it gets frustrating to see such basic mistakes made. This site can teach you a lot about photography, but only if you are willing to learn. I see that you didn't indicate that any of the commenters' comments were ticked, as they should have been.
We can only teach as well as you can learn.
Susan
