this would have been helped with a tighter crop that would have let the viewer become more engaged with those soleful eyes. also, even though you were low, i don't think you were low enough. for some reason, photos of animals and children seem more interesting when shot at or just below their eye-level.
i would encourage you to REALLY PRACTICE shooting without looking through the viewfinder. get used to holding the camera down to the ground or over your head, pointing it towards your subject. yeah, a lot of shots don't come out, but the ones that do are usually a lot more interesting...
This image is just as cute as all get-out, and i see there's virtual unanimity in that opinion. It's a little difficult to critique it well since you have provided NO information whatsoever; whatlens, what f/stop. ISO, shutter speed? No photographer's comments on what you were after. Kind of a tabula rasa, as it were.
The strengths of the image are its powerful basic composition and the expression on the face of the prominent beagle, plus the muted color palette which reinforces a sort of sense of somberness, so that the viewer is kind of torn between giggling and feeling a little sad. This is all good.
On the other hand, there's a lot of compositional elements that are distracting from the key elements. Most obviously, these include the very bright hole in the back of the barrel above the lead beagle's head and the oddly out-of-place half-rock in the foreground. Simply cropping the rock out to make a more horizontal composition seems to help when I look at it that way. I'd have given some thoguht, also, to cloning out the distracting hole, or at least muting its brightness by a zone or a zone-and-a-half.
I'd also have tried some local contrast/brightness control in the depths of the barrel to bring up the hindmost beagle's face a little better. Finally, the upper left corner is a pretty busy, cluttered, non-contributing element which might have nenefitted from being burned in a bit.
You're also aware you have a sharpness issue, with the sense that the subject dog's face is not the crispest element in the image. However, this doesn't seem to me a focus issue as much as it seems to be a lack of sharpening of the image as a whole. I've taken the liberty of doing a quick-n-dirty reworking of it to illustrate what I'm taling about; I hope you don't mind.
Adorable! Neat composition with the straight piece of wood and the round barrel... but you just keep getting sucked back into that cute little face staring at you!
Oh my gosh! How cute is this? Love the look in the central pups eyes. Very nice photo, meets the challenge well in my opinion! Very interesting framing for the pups too. 9 from me!
Adorable photo. :) For some reason the rock at the bottom is a little distracting. I love how the main puppy is looking directly at the camera. :)I'm probably biased a little because I have 2 beagles, and adore them, but this is a definite favorite of mine. :)
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