A client's child's toy room, top shelf of a cupboard jammed with toys. I positioned only the rainbow horse, and only after the shot realized that I had some nice flow going through the pic from eye to eye to eye of all the various toys.
pp: curves, brightness/contrast, hue/saturation/lightness, warming filter, crop, flatten image, resize, unsharp mask, sharpen edges, save for web
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I seem to remember you posting in the TS thread about this picture, and wondering why it was doing badly. Through CC random assignment, I seem to have been picked to answer that. So please don't get offended, I'm just trying to help.
Things I like about this photo:
I think the idea is sweet. There's a sort of invisible movement of the child in it, almost, as you imagine the child playing day after day, and the toys watching from the shelf. The colours are great, especially that horse, and yes, you're right, the eyes are very cool, especially the way they all seem to be looking in roughly the same direction, as if watching someone.
Things I don't like about it:
The composition is extremely busy and seems entirely random. That piece of table at the bottom seems out of place. The shadows are noisy and the highlights are blown. You can see traces of oversharpening. The randomness of the composition combined with the POV makes it look like a snapshot. I'm sorry, I think the idea was good, and the subject had potential, but I just don't think it's a very good picture.
Ways to improve it:
First of all, lets get you away from auto settings... At least get used to using aperture priority, it still gives you all the wonder of auto exposure, but with some creative control over your images. ISO100 to get rid of the noise. Underexpose a little bit because of the highlights, make sure the aperture you use is sufficient for the sharpness you want (the oversharpening seems like an attempt to compensate for this), if it's too dark, get a tripod out, your subjects aren't going anywhere in this one. Just make sure you've got the technicals. Then... Try different arrangements of toys, different angles, play with the possibilities of different depths of field. Try light-painting them to see what happens. Maybe have a moving object or a single ray of light (long exposures allow for all sorts of messing around). Just play with it and find out what works. And shoot and shoot until you come up with something spectacular.
Hope that helps, and good luck. If you fancy a side challenge, you could always try reshooting and seeing how you can improve that shot!
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