Mildred the Moose Passes Time on a Rural Michigan Farmby
dirtkahunaComment by Koriyama: **Critique club**
This image suffers from a number of tiny flaws. You have the makings of a good image here, though. Post-shooting editing would help you a lot.
Firstly, let's consider the age-old advice about filling the frame. You have roughly 3 content areas: the sky, the snow and the animal. The sky is boring, so cut that out. Interest lies in the animal, mainly and in the snow. Cropping around the animal would help give this image more punch and help the viewer focus in on the subject. Kill the sky. Zooming right in would also help eliminate some of the distracting fences.
Next, we need to think about exposure. I don't know if you relied on the autoexposure in your camera or not, but I think here that the snow and the face are underexposed - both signs of automatic metering at work. Generally, you need to compensate up by 1.5 stops for snow. That would, incidentally, help the face, too. Personally, I would manually meter for the snow and the face and choose a reading which helped both, rather than rely on autometering.
Thirdly, focus. Although it's generally okay, there isn't any spot which jumps out at me. Using f8 was probably a result of trying to get the whole shot in with your camera's shutter capacity. I'd have used a ND filter, opened up the f-stop to it's widest, then focussed on the eyes.
The lack of a sharp focal points indicates another weakness here. Metaphorically, there isn't really a focal point, either. This is just an animal in a field. What's the animal feeling? doing? thinking? You need to find your point and develop your shot for that. The above points of exposure, composition and focus would all be pulled into a tight co-ordination once your subject point is organised.
Finally, a word about titles. I see from your profile that you're a musician writing music for your band. That's great. If you also write the lyrics, too, you'll understand that need for titles which are designed well. You might consider retitling your shot, too. I'd think about poetic rules, such as rhythm, assonance, alliteration and so on. (You've started with the 'M' theme, might that be made more meaningful?)
If you have any comments on this critique, please feel free to contact me.
Best wishes,
Jim
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