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dsternerComment by levyj413: Hi. I'm responding to your request for comment.
First, I would've voted this a 6 or 7 had I seen it. So everything I'm going to say comes from that starting point. You did several things very well: the overall composition, the use of and placement of the glasses, the nice shallow DOF. To say nothing of the idea in the first place! Unlike me, you chose an acronym that's actually well-known. :)
I'm no expert on what the average DPCer thinks, but I'm guessing you would've scored better with two changes:
1) Add more contrast. Without doing it myself, I'm not sure how much you could push it; newspaper really is gray, not white.
2) Crop out the top and left because the table and the fold distract from the nice simple composition of glasses and newspaper. Given the image dimensions, I'm guessing you didn't crop at all, and there's not much room to crop from this specific shot. So this advice falls into the "when you shoot next time." Pay a lot of attention to little angles and slivers of stuff creeping into the edges that you don't want to have in your final image. I've heard it called "border patrol" - visually sweep your eye along the outer edge before hitting the shutter button. In this case, simply unfolding the newspaper to fill the frame would've taken care of it.
Frankly, I'm no genius at that, and I'm agonizing right now about an upcoming challenge entry that wasn't quite right when I shot it, but I don't have excess pixels to play with. So just work on it as much as you can.
Finally, look at your commenters' average: 6.67! You obviously connected very strongly with those folks. Average scores are a bit of a crapshoot, so I try to focus on the people who really like my shots. There will always be some people who don't much care for any shot, so don't worry about them.
Photographer found comment helpful.
