A drop in a cup of Milk.by
SharQComment by emorgan49: Hello from the Critique Club.
I'm sure you think this photo should have done better so I'll address the scoring issue first. Your score suffered from burn out (does that phrase translate out of English, I wonder). There have been several droplet phots submitted in other challenges in the past. Most recently was a photo called Blueberry splash, which got a ribbon. In this challenge I think I counted six milk splash photos. Even though the photos are randomly sorted for each voter, by the time you get to the third, you begin to get sick of them. Many voters score down for "copy cat" images, so all the splashes were at a disadvantage from the start. So why did yours place last of the spashes?
Your picture is technically excellent. The stop action is perfect, DOF is perfect, focus is perfect, lighting is perfect. But all this doesn't add up to a perfect picture. It lacks human interest. It feels like it belongs in a physics textbook.
The composition is lacking. The crown is placed in the "thirds" position but to me it is too far off center. It is the focal point of the scene, but no compositional elements lead to it or away from it to anything in the rest of the shot. It seems like two thirds of the photo is dead weight. The high droplets are a little interesting and maybe the edge of the cup looks like a planet, but neither have enough draw to justify ther inclusion in the crop. This is a phot that would benefit immensely from a different crop. Try an up and down orientation so you get the sense that the sinker started from above, sunk and splashed the milk up. Try getting rid of the black rim altogether leaving a white on white image like the more sucessful photo of the flower in the milk bath.
Probably this submission would have done better is you had spent as much time polishing it up as you did perfecting the technique. But Hey! Now you are a master at the droplet techinique and you can out splash anyone here next time. Just don't submit a milk splash for a few weeks.
Message edited by author 2003-01-29 18:32:56. 
Photographer found comment helpful.
