sobered snareby
mjc155Comment by indigo997: One word of advice, if you care about the score then you have to be very careful to meet the challenge in a very obvious way. If you mainly want to just get annoying comments and show an alternate interpretation, then go right ahead. More power to you. Much as we might dislike it, this is a bit of a popularity contest for our pictures. You have to learn to appeal to a wide audience in order to get high scores.
I only subtract one point for not meeting the challenge, but LOTS of voters will automatically drop you to a 3 for it. Then they'd drop another point for having soft focus and a composition that isn't as strong as it could be. I think that's how you ended up with such a low score.
The description for this challenge said that you should make color the most important element of your photo. I'm usually pretty open minded about these things, but no matter how I look at this photo, I don't think of color as an important element because there is no color. Even if you took a shot and desaturated everything except one small item, using the selective color to make the subject stand out would have met the challenge IMO.
As far as the picture goes outside of the challenge... I think that the lighting is a bit too dark - there could be a greater tonal range or more contrast between the light and dark. Focus IS soft. It was probably because you were too close to the subject for your camera, and the aperture is way too small to allow any leeway. I think the subject is good, (not for this challenge) but you need a different way of shooting it. Having the bottom part cut off by the frame just doesn't work. You might be able to do a close-up from a lower angle that uses shallow dof... creating a diagonal that leads into the background with the drumsticks. I'm not sure... even shooting directly from above so that it is more symmetric and geometric would work better for me.
Don't get too frustrated with the score. It's all a learning experience.
