Stillness Withinby
LaMasComment by purpleflutterby13: Greetings from the Critique Club.
First of all - welcome to the madness of DPC challenges.
This is a very interesting image. The first striking thing about it is the wealth of textures - the walls, her cloak, the rug above her head. The depth of field works well for this.
The composition isn't necessarily very DPC friendly - the conventional thing to do is to make the subject very much the focus of the picture, and steer clear of any distractions (like the rug above her head), unless they're directly complementing the subject. However, the fact that it's unconventional makes it interesting.
The other obvious DPC objection is that the face isn't in focus. Again, I'm not convinced it's a valid objection. The voters have a bias towards very crisp, clear images, but in this case the soft focus and shadows on her face make it look quite mysterious, and are possibly complementing what you were trying to achieve with the photo.
The white spots in the lower right corner are quite distracting. I know these just randomly happen, to the best of my knowledge, the only real solution is to take lots and lots of images, then pick the ones that don't have such problems (I've taken anything up to 300 for a single challenge).
In terms of the post-processing:
I would've cropped a small part of the bottom of the picture to get rid of the white line in the right corner. The best way to get exactly the relations you want between the blacks and whites in the picture is to use the 'curves' function in Photoshop, which might potentially improve the picture. Also, I don't know what you used to convert it to B&W, I find the channel mixer does a much better job than the 'desaturate' function, as you can get exactly the level of contrast you want by playing with the percentages. Also, the image is 620px high, which is close to the maximum, but you might as well use the full dimensions allowed - the bigger the image is, the more of a chance it gives the viewers to appreciate it.
Anyway - hope this helps, and keep on entering challenges!
Any questions, just PM me.
Jelena
Message edited by author 2007-04-02 17:49:47. 
Photographer found comment helpful.
