2 Days Oldby
shankswareComment by Artifacts: Positives:
Greens contrasted against full earth tones with good background bokeh to emphasize the challenge topic.
Technicals:
Overall a decent quality macro capture. Brown tones across the whole image well emphasizes your intended purpose.
The general composition lacks a directing purpose and a true central interest point for viewers to latch onto and has a very shallow depth of field at f/2.8. It needs something more added to the composition.
Contrast looks weak but overall technical quality is acceptible except for the blurring of some of the plant leaves is not very smooth and act as viewer distractions because they are so close to the sharpest areas of the image. Their edges just don't look right.
The Challenge:
Obviously, you met the challenge. Despite all the discussion about such things virtually every photographer intends to and does meet the challenge. That is not a big issue here.
Though yours is a little more pronounced than most, you will notice that 85% of voters scored your image 4, 5, or 6... only 15% outside that range. It is fairly typical for an image be scored in a narrow range and therefore hard to know exactly what it means. There are HUGE quality differences between images scored 4.0 from ones scored 6.0 yet that is the mixed message sent to you with your vote distribution curve.
The fact there are only 15% of the votes above or below this range probably means there was little in the composition to provoke a user reaction. You were scored below average in a high quality challenge, but with added value this image would have finished much higher.
Suggestions:
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Probably the most important thing to do to "improve" your image is to add something more to the composition.
Your image reminds me of a story
DrAchoo told about this sorta similar red ribbon winner he took for the Shapes challenge:
He explained that he picked a pea sprout with an interesting swirl from his garden and taped it to the kid's swing set to photograph. But he felt it was missing something so vainly went in search of his tradmark ladybug to include in the composition. He couldn't find one. Then he remembered where there were some big ants so went and got one, put it on the sprout and quickly photographed it for about 30 seconds while the ant struggled to escape.
Your image needs it's ant or equivalent. The sprouts are not enough. Its a great setting waiting for a main subject. The highest scoring images not only meet the challenge but always have added value to make the composition unique and more interesting.
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Even with your lens wide open you still had to have a 13 second exposure to get the picture. It would be very difficult include any animate object at that shutter speed. Additionally, shallow depth of field(DOF) hurt this image in voting somewhat. You need to shoot at a higher f/number for greater DOF. You could either lengthen the exposure time or get more lighting to make that possible. Of course, shooting at a higher f/number would screw up your great circular background bokeh. Ya just can't win sometimes and have to make compromises.
To see if the contrast is 'really' weak just do a quick "autolevels" adjustment. If it looks better to you after "autolevels" then it is weak and should be adjusted. :)
Photographer found comment helpful.
