The Absolut Dad: Always Fun and Drinks Responsiblyby
DdhjokerComment by FrankRobinson: Hi Douglas, welcome to the Critique Zone!
I have a feeling that this might be a long one, so please sit comfortably! Also worth bearing in mind that this is just my opinion and at least one of your other commenters would disagree. To me, this shot looks uncomfortable and a little rushed. There clearly is a story here but I initially thought that it was mostly in the name - it wasn't until I read your extensive comments (thanks for those - really helped me understand what you were going for!) that I 'got' it. Obviously during a challenge, the voters don't have that and will have dismissed this as not meeting the challenge.
Technical: The shot is soft. Likely to be several reasons - your aperture is pretty wide for the Depth of Field that you need, I wouldn't drop below f7.1 for this really. You also mention some resize problems (see below) which can kill sharpness. The lighting is not good - your white balance is off giving this a really amateur 'warm' cast. You could correct this by using custom white balance (see the manual!) or by shooting in RAW and fixing it later, which would be my choice. The Canon DPP conversion tool is really effective, I use that instead of the Photoshop RAW converter so there is no excuse to shoot JPEG really.
Post-Processing: I think that the saturation is over done - this is a really busy shot anyway, and too much colour doesn't help. If you are using photoshop, sharpen using the Unsharp Mask tool at full size, then re-size the image using the image size tool in the 'image' menu (72 dpi and 800px on the long side) and sharpen again, using a smaller radius (0.6px?) and strength (70% or so). Use the 'save for web' command in the file menu and select 'optimise' and set to 300kb. That's how most people do it.
Artistic: The $64billion question... I personally don't like the perspective - it is too commanding and doesn't give the intimate family / drinker feel that I think that this needs. Perhaps making it look as if the viewer (the camera in this case!) is 'at the table' would help? It's also just way too cluttered - without the scattered lego and the tea sets I might have noticed the bottle, but I didn't until after reading your comments. Less is normally more. On the plus side, it does look as if you have a couple of fantastic models who might just help you get some cracking shots in the future!
Hope at least some of this helps.
Happy hunting,
Frank.
Photographer found comment helpful.