Mirrowed Flowerby
AlanBesComment by e301: from the back room of the Critique Club
I think the basic idea here is good - for the challenge, of course; it might have been better, in a purely compositional way, had you been able to get the reflection of that flower without having the actual flower in shot - but given the convexity of the spoon that's terribly difficult.
Two things I think promarily hurt this one: firstly the composition, your framing of the image: either you've allowed too much negative space image right, of simply haven't managed to get the angle on the spoon - the diagonal line is always a very strong compositional element (look at som many of the recent studio shot winners) - but this has drifted too far off that line to really work.
The second thing is the quality of the image itself. It doesn't have the clarity, the level of fine detail that winning shots here have. Now this certainly isn't down to your camera - we all know how precise the 350 can be - so i think it must be in your processing. I couldn't really say which part of the process has caused the problem - perhaps the 'clarifiying' step - these automatic actions are designed to work with Joe Punter's photographs of their holidays - ratherthan a naturally high-contrast image like this, and that may have pushed the tonality of the spoon into the funny slightly blobky feeling it has here. perhaps it's your re-sizing process, I don't know. It could also be your sharpening - looking along the nearer edge of the fork, there is that tell-tale line of white that looks generated rather than natural, and that could well be a sharpening thing. At the risk of teaching grandmothers etc., I'd suggest using setting something like radius:0.6, amount:100, clipping:5 for sharpening, and making it the last thing you do in your processing - the miss-use of it is so often a cause for detail problems in people's work, and I remember the impact on my own stuff when i realised you could set the radius below 1; but like I said, I don't know that that's actually the issue.
HTH
e
Photographer found comment helpful.
