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suryComment by Brad: Greetings from the Critique Club!
"Take a childhood game and run with it"
(OK, so it's not just limited to children...)
Composition:
You met the challenge head on by having all 3 elements in the image. Overall this image is lacking a main or central focal point, in that what do the eyes get drawn to naturally in the image. When we look at an image and find ourselves looking all over the scene, trying to find something to grab hold of, it makes a viewer lose attention quickly. In the voting process here, you may only get a couple of seconds to make an impression to the viewer and grab their attention.
In your composition, the three items looked to be just placed together in order to take a picture, and overall doesn't have a theme or story to tell. Creativity is the name of the game and your items needed to be arranged in a way to make it interesting, funny or emotive, rather than just set down and snap a shot of them. There are also numerous items in the shot that don't support the items and can be a distraction.
Lighting:
Overall the lighting is fairly even. The highlights are not blown out (an easy thing to do), and yet the shadows retained detail.
Post-Processing:
The image is a little on the dark side and am not sure the tone used in your post-processing compliments your subjets. The whites are in fact white and your black level is good. Image sharpness seems a little off and hurts the detail. If a soft focus was attempted, it would look soft, whereas this looks like it was meant to be sharp, but fell just a little short.
Suggestions/Improvements:
The best word of advise and/or suggestions I can give you is to go back to this challenge and look at maybe the top 50 images and see what made them stand out. I realize trying to acheive what the photographers did in say the top 10 images can be very difficult to do without expensive equipment, but most often creativity will make up for lesser equipment.
We all want to have expensive gear, but the reality is, that though it may help, it won't make up for lack of imagination. I have done just that - competed with the best equipment on the site with my 5-year old camera, so I know it can be done.
In closing, I hope this was fun, which is the main purpose sometimes when we pick up a camera. We may feel silly setting up and shooting something like this
(I get some odd looks from passerbys at times - LOL), but it's educational and should be fun in the process.
I hope this was useful to you, and please feel free to contact me via PM if you have any questions regarding this critique or anything else relating to the site in general.
Regards,
Brad
Photographer found comment helpful.
