Friday Night Lightsby
APComment by dewdodesign: Greetings from the Critique Club!
Firstly i'd like to congratulate you on your 12th place and your new personal best, these three shots certainly deserve all the praise and high votes.
Composition
Commenting on the layout first, I really like the way you have laid these out, especially the fact that the panorama is positioned in the middle and seperates the other two images of equal sizes.
All three images have been composed extremely well, my favourite being the bottom of the three for the unique view point, I really love the angles. I also like the tight crop on the panorama which helps to keep it an interesting image with little dead space. In the top one you have obviously thought a lot about the position of the tree as it has been used effectively to frame the picture. If anything it is slightly too overpowering and detracts from other interest in the scene.
Lighting
I can imagine all three of these were pretty hard to both meter and capture effectively. Starting with the bottom one, I like the orange lights to the left as they tend to guide my eye along the image. I'm not so keen on the lighting to the right as it looks slighty overblown and quite distracting. The middle one is pretty much spot on but seems to suffer from a fair amount of background noise which causes some of the light to look fairly un-natural and distorted in some places.
The top one is really nice and almost looks like a painting, in fact all three of them look fairly arty and this is definitely a good thing.
Conclusion
All three of these have strengths and weaknesses, the bottom one suffers from some harsh lighting and I'm not too keen on the person being included in the scene, I know it is meant to show motion and activity but it does nothing for me as it is slightly too blurred to add any real impact.
The middle one appears to suffer from a fair amount of background noise which is a real shame as it causes the lights to become slightly distorted. The top one is probably the strongest in terms of technicality but is perhaps a little too dark for the amount of detail included in the scene.
The strengths, which have been commented on by other members during voting, have helped to create three great looking images which work harmoniously with one another.
Keep up the great work!
Chris
Photographer found comment helpful.