escape
by tomzinho

Comment by justine:
Great find here, and good eye to see it. Neat shot, well done, good luck to you.

brightening my day
by tomzinho

Comment by Bitz:
Magnificent! Who says flowers are cliche'? Well done!

escape
by tomzinho

Comment by jerrft:
Nice submission - cropping at bottom is a tad abrupt.

cityscape (urban landscape), blue sky and white puffy clouds
by tomzinho

Comment by aussie:
CC: I love how you have used your lens in this particular shot. I can see that it is a little blurry, but it's just a minor flaw. The clouds are just awesome and the way you have captured this picture overall makes the sky look very dramatic. If you took this in B&W on a really overcast day and did a little manipulation in PS, it would certainly be a more dramatic photo (just a suggestion). I really like how you have captured those buildings with peaks on them it adds to the dramatic feel. Overall a great picture and certainly meets the challenge. Excellent job and well done.

cityscape (urban landscape), blue sky and white puffy clouds
by tomzinho

Comment by Dustin:
nice subject. good job.

what do we want to see . . . where do we want to go?
by tomzinho

Comment by magnetic9999:
Critique Club

The strange property you refer to is 'perspective'. It causes parallel lines to appear to converge. It's caused by your shooting from an angle to the side. You could correct it with the perspective tool in photoshop, if you have that program.

As I said before, it's a bit fuzzy. The colors are great, though. Is that green stained glass in there?

If you shot this again, you shouldn't cut off the words on the left side. The lucky catch of the person inside the right hand door is a good addition. Helps tell a 'story'. It might be a little too subtle tho.

weekday to weekend (cover one half and then the other)
by tomzinho

Comment by lisae:
Cool idea... but the lighting is far too stark and the photo has little tonal depth. It needs more contrast, but if you do that, the jacket on the right will be indistinguishable from the background. I think you should have used a white background or maybe grey, and not used front lighting (is it the flash?).

cityscape (urban landscape), blue sky and white puffy clouds
by tomzinho

Comment by Olyuzi:
So much sky...I think a telephot would have been a better choice here.

cityscape (urban landscape), blue sky and white puffy clouds
by tomzinho

Comment by PTLParsons:
Are you using an unusual lens. The cityscape appear to be rounded and all leaning toward the center. The sky and clouds are beautiful, but the bottom 1/10 of the photo ruins the sky. Flatten out the horizon and you have a winner.

(simplicity) one big square - sixty four small squares - infinite outcomes (complexity)
by tomzinho

Comment by sylandrix:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

COMPOSITION... I find the composition very pleasing, if not for some of the technical errors I will cover in my next paragraph... I think it fits the challenge very strongly, a very pleasing and symmetrical composition. Your description mentions your board is at an angle, but its too slight for me even to notice. I like the bird's eye framing, and the fact that its a unique and colorful chess set you just can't find anywhere. The whiteboard provides an elegant natural frame to the photo and really makes the colors stand out by putting them next to a space with absolutely no color at all. i didn't find there was too much negative space, and this comes from someone who generally does not like empty space in photos :) I think if you took out more white, it would look like an ordinary shot of a chess board.

TECHNIQUE... It was apparent even without your comments that the photo's saturation and exposure were pushed to the extreme. I'm not exactly sure why you chose to do this, though I do understand that it was intentional and not an "error" on your part. Nonetheless, I find the over saturation deteriorates the quality of the image you have, and makes it appear grainier than it should. Not a grain that's typical of a high speed 35mm film, but a grain that's courser, more pixellated and not as appealing as film grain. I tried reversing the saturation back to a normal level, and also removing some of the overexposure, and find the resulting image just as appealing, if not more appealing than this interpretation. I think the shot would actually look more fine and detailed without the extreme image modifications made. If you want to give your photo more punch, before saturating, try a levels adjustment. After i de-saturated the image, I played with that and the final result looked really sharp, and still colorful and full of a wide variety of tones.

OVERALL... good composition and subject matter, but I think your score and image quality suffered from the extreme post-editing performed on your shot.