Breakfast - your first square mealby
psychephylaxComment by sylandrix: Greetings from the Critique Club!
COMPOSITION...This area could use some improvement. Objects seem to be placed in a haphazard fashion and are not tied together. There is also no main subject - nothing that the eye can immediately settle on or follow. Don't forget before snapping to try many ways of looking at your still life and don't hesitate to rearrange your items ad nauseum unitil you have some arrangement that stands out from the rest. Perhaps a more angled shot where some of the food items were at the forefront, (in this case it should be the square ones) with others playing a minor role in the background, would have worked better.
TECHNIQUE... To tell you the truth, the food items do not look appealing. Well its true that whenever food is photographed, so many (non-edible) treatments are applied to the food in question to make it look edible, but I doubt you or I would have access to this kind of stuff, or if we did, we wouldn't know about it. All I can think of is adding a bit of soft focus to the shot (for DPC, using an old filter with glycerin or vaseline smeared on it, or stocking net over the lens). That should hopefully soften out the "greasy" look which is really hard to avoid - food never looks appealing when photographed the way it is, one of the first things I learned in my studio still life course. Light is average, photo looks like it can be lightened a bit but I'll need to look at the photo on a calibrated monitor before I could say that. Background is simple and effective.
OVERALL... well, despite the food not looking appealing, its still a very good attempt which I imagine would take some effort. Food is a very challenging subject to try to photograph, kudos for taking it on :)
Photographer found comment helpful.