Ring of Fireby
kanoComment by Artyste: Greetings from the Critique Club. My critiques are generally geared towards trying to help you improve your score within DPC, and not on any true "artistic" merit of the photograph itself, unless it relates to DPC voters and scoring. Please keep that in mind as you read this.
Initial Thoughts
Simple, engaging, and well representative of the challenge.
Composition/Content
While some of your commenters thought the composition needed a little work, I believe that it's quite strong as it is. You have some good use of negative space, and beautiful symmetry. I don't think that was your problem. Contentually, it might be a little.. "dull".. but not overly so, and the blue flame and symmetry of the shot really help. Simplicity is generally overlooked sometimes, and I quite like it in this case. You do have a distracting bright element in the lower right of the burner, which people probably noticed that throws things off more than it probably should.
Background
Nice, solid black.
Camera Work/Technical
A good exposure. The problem with the bright area I don't exactly know how to fix. You might have wanted to try to selectively burn that down a little so it didn't stand out so much, or perhaps some creative cloning. It really is the one critical detail, that stands out simply because of the darker image and the symmetry of the rest of the shot.
Digital Processing
As I said, working on the bright area would have helped a lot, I think. There are also a few artifacts remaining in your flames, giving them the "not DPC smooth" look that could have garnered a few subconciously low votes. Not sure if that was a product of saving it to jpg or something in your RAW conversion though.
Fits the Challenge
Well, I don't see how it doesn't.. Flames generally aren't cool :)
My Opinion of the Photo
A wonderfully simple take on the challenge that I, myself probably would have voted quite high. If it wasn't for the fact that you have one glaring bright spot throwing the image off a bit, and the fact that because of the simplicity that I personally like, you were probably given the "eh, not wow" vote, you might have scored much higher. I personally believe this is underrated, but it's DPC we're talking about here. While I have no suggestions on how to increase that all-important "WOW".. I think you shoud be proud of just giving us an image that is peaceful and contemplative.
P.S. Something I just thought of. Had you considered rotating this so that the flame ring was at the bottom of the image? That's a composition that might have increased the strength of the image as well. Just a thought. Also, as undieyatch pointed out.. you also fell victim to the "Too many similar photos in the challenge" syndrome. Which I despise, but is all too real. So unfortunate. However, it *is* true.. Getting a good shot is one thing, getting a good *original* shot is quite another.. so for future challenges, try to get that ol' thinking cap on and don't fall into the trap of shooting something that might be a very popular subject.
From experience though, that's harder than it sounds.
Message edited by author 2006-06-02 06:15:31. 
Photographer found comment helpful.
