The best looking decade
by Hordur Ace

Comment:
propping up the end of the bar of the Critique Club

Whilst there is undoubtedly a large amount of 80's references here, and thus a strong meeting of the challenge, I do think that your oberall composition and lighting have prevented you from scoring any higher with the voters.

First off, the three elements that really draw the eye are the faces and the mirror-ball. Those elements are all gathered at the top of frame here and slightly uncomfortably arranged - her face and his face aren't balanced with the mirror-ball, and the slightly different off-sets fromm the edge of frame also i think make for some awkwardness for the viewer. The lower part of frame, your models' legs, is badly lit - simply not bright enough, I think, and disappearing into black. That effect has the beginnings of the idea of night-club lighting, but the lack of very tighly focussed light and of any colour doesn't help with that overall effect and it ends up feeling like a mistake.

I think, perhaps, more effect could have been generated by not simply including all of the models. You seem to have framed this to get all of them in - head to toe; but what's actually important, to my eye, is only certain elements of their clothing - the skirt, her make-up, his rolled up sleeves. The overblown poses are effective for the period, but again, I don't think it entirely necessary to have full body shots to communicate that.

Perhaps also, more interaction between the two would make for a more dynamic image - they seem to be in two completely separate worlds these two people, having little to do with each other.

A Reflection on the 80's
by Meera

Comment:
from behind the freezer of the Critique Club

I find the range of hyper-picky historico-pedantic comments rather hard to take, even as a disinterested dearder of someone else's comments. What the hell is the point of that? And it's made especially pointless when a bunch of supposedly 'punk' images dominate the ribbons in this challenge.

Well, I'm afraid there's no defense against the small-minded other than to go along one's way, without letting such things get under one's skin, but it can be hard: it seems there's almost a desperation to find some way, any way to dismiss an image from proper consideration in a challenge.

There are a couple of things I do like here, and a couple I think may prove to have been optimistic ideas. The brightness, almost the brashness of the image seems to me very fitting to the period we were asked to imitate - and of course the subject and your treatment of it is absolutely OK. Your shiny material - and the sand-like quality that you've noticed, causes problems though: precisely because it does look so much like sand, I suspect many people will have actually taken it for sand, and decided that you've over-exposed your background - despite the evidence of the reflection of the cube. Unravelling that, however small, visual puzzle is asking for more time from the punters than a first shoot through is going to get you, though.

Privet
by senoj

Comment:
some kind of 0900 server error here; my critique is posted below but the fact hasn't registered with the site. Not only are you dead last yet again, you get another comment simply to get this image off my screen!

Privet
by senoj

Comment:
from the smallest room of the Critique Club

What is there to say? You have evidently achieved pretty much what you set out to here, with the added masterstroke of making the cyrillic script just recognisable enough through the haze of the focus to put off even those english monoglots that might have hung around long enough to find anything in the image.

I don't think though that this one was oarticularly challenging - it's easy enough, simplky by taking an out of focus shot with nothing to do with the challenge, to achieve last place, no? I'd be more intrigued to see if it can be done with a shot that 'meets the challenge', as the saying has it.

All the best

e

A Face in the Candlelight.
by likewh0a

Comment:
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A Face in the Candlelight.
by likewh0a

Comment:
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DONT DISTURB ME IM WORKING RIGHT NOW ....ok?
by sandeepsalwan45

Comment:
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Making Justice
by pellemannen

Comment:
from the hay-lost of the Critique Club

It's an interesting approach to the challenge, I think. It's very rare for a slightly off-the-wall angle to thing to be at al understood, let alone appreciated here (in fact, it's entirely possible to make an interesting experience out of a whole process of gentle piss-taking of the challenge theme thing). But here, I sense, is a genuine appreciation of the ideas of the virtues, and an interesting illustraction of those ideas in action - the concentration on this small balancing act between the two kids is fantastic, and the distortion of features in the glasses just adds extra emphasis to the whole idea. Candid, set-up, whatever, and who cares? I hope it's a proper grabbing-of-the-moment photograph - but whatever, it works.

Now, as to what doesn't work. You just need to get a handle on the whole processing thing. Believe me, if you can enter this shot for one of these challenges, you know what the difficult bit of photography is about - the moment, the capture of the important thing as it is presented to you - but boy, you really need, I would say, to get a hold of what the idea of presenation in photography is about. This looks straight out of the camera - and never forget, that what comes straight out of your camera is designed to amke people's holiday photographs look as good as possible. Put this in black and white, do a careful adjustment with levels, so that you have as wide a range of tones as you can find in this scene, and you'd have so much more high-scoring a photograph - for dpc, you must always present children photographs as a piece of art, at the very least.

Looking through your stuff here at dpc, I'd say you have some potential as a photographer; I think it's worth remembering a salient point about any endeavour: 'if it was easy, then everyone would be doing it'.

God Is Closer to My Heart
by cfischl

Comment:
from the tail-end of the Critique Club

Although the challenge has the clear instruction to follow your - that is, your own, personal, interpretation of the word 'heart', nevertheless, in the eyes of the mass of voters here, that instruction is not to be followed too loosely. This a number of the comments you recieved - especially those referring to your title. Many people are enormously presumtious, not realising that some don't obsess about this place, aren't consumed with a sense of personal achievement from their average vote recieved and so on. I would advise that you don't be disheartened by it: those voices are usually not the ones that remain for the long haul.

However, there is the valid point that if this image is a good entry for this challenge, the exactly what kind of image is not? It's difficult ground, and perhaps not worth digging into too deeply. nevertheless, it is surely that element of things that has hurt your score here.

presuming that cosre isn't very interesting to you ... your main problem with this shot is, i think, either a function of your depth of field or the hand-held nature of it (if it isn't hand-held, why shoot at ISO 800?). It just isn't particularly detailed - not a sense of being out of focus, but rather of a slight motion blurring of most details. I'm sure your colour process hasn't helped, but equally sure that that isn't the only problem. There's also a slight sense pof distortion to the image: on closer examination, everything seeems to be parallel, and centred appropriate to such a graphic image, and yet something is certainly astray, and gives a sense of distortion to those supposedly staight lines.

Personally, the image holds little interest for me: if it's an examination of the visula structure of the cathedral, then it has little new to offer, and if it's more than that then I fail to percieve the point. Fundamanetally, whatever processes have produced whatever interesting colours (not that I agree with that assessment), I don't finmd anything here to be very far removed from decent, technicaqlly assured architectural photography - but tath can be so much more than this presentation.

e

Heart - Abstract
by TomH1000

Comment:
I'm not at all sure what the point of photography is, in realtion to this image. I would have thought it might be almost as easy to start with a blank frame, and simply create this in photoshop. Even the rather dodgy winning photographs in this challenge have strong elements of photography in them, whereas this has almost none of that.

Of course, that may be your point: a reaction to the idea of the source material being irrelevent to the challenge. I don't know.

from a photographic standpoint, I find almost nothing here to critique. What am I supposed to say? Your depth of field is too shallow? I think not.

It holds interest, however, i think, for what it does to the relation of the DPC world presentation (that shade of grey), and the sense of three-dimensionality: but opther shots have done it more profoundly - look out the old 'challenge' shot, which probably appears on the lowest scoring photos page. Given the nature of this challenge, and the exceptional rules, there's almost no framework for forming an opinion on this shot.