Girly Whirlyby
levyj413Comment by Artifacts: Positives:
Nicely captures the idea of spinning and childhood fun. The blur very nicely shows circular rotation and is its greatest strength.
Technicals:
The background hurts this image. You said, "would've brightened up the background, which I wanted to avoid, so I skipped it". Understood that you wanted the spinning child to stand out. Ironically, though, this may have helped reduced the score more than helped it because the BG is dark and has no interesting detail whatsoever to interest viewers. The BG is more distracting from your subject than supportive.
Overall the image seems dark and oversaturated into the reds and browns. There is a distracting blue speck lower left of your subject. Might be slightly oversharpened.
In motion blur images you want the still detail to be sharp and interesting for the viewer to look at and to provide a solid visual base for them WITHIN the image.
The Challenge:
No question. Meets the challenge very well. Overall technical quality affected your score more than challenge topic.
Suggestions:
The concept is great and you captured spinning very, very well. You just need to work on the technical quality of the image and add more supportive interest for viewers.
Perhaps you could put a blanket or solid colored tarp of some kind on the ground under your subject and add a toy to improve viewer background interest. A complementary color like yellow might work well.
Perhaps you did try and reject this, but a slightly longer shutter speed than 1/20th, maybe 1/10th or more, would work to. Back off on sharpening a bit and perhaps employ noise reduction to make the motion a little smoother. That can be tricky without making the rest of the image look 'plastic'.
Photographer found comment helpful.
