Sunshine and Laceby
mpreslarComment by amber: Hi from the Critique Club!
Having read your comments (which voters cannot see when voting) I can see clearly what you were aiming for here, but without your comments I think many were confused as to the point of your image. Voters tend not to want to work too hard when they are ploughing their way through 300+ images. If they cannot immediately 'get it' they vote low.
I can see why you picked this subject. It's always quite breath-taking seeing a spider's web glistening in the sun. However, it's difficult to get the camera to capture that perfect moment.
Your focus is centred on the right hand side of the branch. Because your aperture is at 2.8, you have a really shallow depth of field, causing everything else in your image to be out of focus, again making it difficult for the voters to see the story of your image. The wide open aperture has also caused some overexposure of the web on the branch, so that you loose a lot of the detail, again making it hard to see the very thing you wanted to highlight. A smaller aperture would have created focus through out the image.
As it's hard to see the web, the voters might have wondered why you placed the branch at the top of your image, leaving so much empty space, again that makes sense ONCE you know it was a spider's web floating in the breeze that you were trying to capture;)
This was a good idea, but a really hard one to capture;)
Photographer found comment helpful.