A Brutal Endby
volcom36Comment by MistyMucky: Greetings from the Critique Club :)
First of all, congratulations! I was looking for another great picture I do remember from this site, in order to compare it with yours. I went through the 25 pages you get after searching for 'fish' and did not find it. But I found that yours was the best from the photos with lots of fish!
So what's a picture of fishes about?
First of all it is about great shapes. The shape of an open mouth is striking and you did well to place it in the center of your composition in order to draw the attention. The tail is another prominent shape and it works well in a corner, but the bottom right part gets a bit lost in the chaotic background.
Secondly, it's about patterns. Again, the diagonal alignment works very well and the one fish lying in the other direction (tail) disturbs the pattern nicely. The pattern would be more effective if it was a bit more regular, but I suppose you could not rearrange them before shooting.
And lastly it's about great shiny colors. Here you missed a bit an opportunity to trigger the WOW-reaction which is so important on this site. I would have played a bit more with curves and saturation or even better tried the LAB technique described here:
//ronbigelow.com/videos/videos.htm
From the technical side, your photo is very good. I'm just not sure about the narrow depth of field, it does weaken the pattern and is perceived as a fault when it is not obviously intentional. I would have used f/5.6.
With a subject which is not necessarily the favorite pet of most of the voters, you did really well. I'm sure you have a great future on DPC! If you have any questions about this critique, please contact me.
Photographer found comment helpful.