My two cents for what they're worth. First of all, on the whole checking a comment as helpful or not issue, not all of us are fussed about it. Personally i do check the box (for most comments), but i don't neccessarily get upset if someone doesn't check a comment from me. Its no big deal. You're free to do what you want.
I wont comment on what you can do to improve this particular image because the comments below and on your forum post pretty much cover that. I'm just here to tell you that you should probably put more thought into the subject itself. I'll be blunt with you. In this case your subject is boring. I find that in these still life type of images, the composition, lighting, editting, focus have to be near-perfect for the image to be interesting. My advice is try to spend more time and thought in choosing your idea. Sometimes, if i'm stumped for ideas, I like to browse through photos (flickr, dA, whatever) not to steal ideas but to find some inspiration. Once you have an idea, try different things with the setup and lighting. Keep trying untill you see what looks best. Don't settle for an image too fast, there's always room for improvement.
Heres an example of a normally boring subject (an onion) that looks amazing because of wonderful lighting and composition.
In response to a few more stray comments; The leaf leading the eye off the page creates a lot of eye movement is a challenge that was all about stillness. I'm not sure if the DOF is intentionally narrow, but a fair amount of the frame is just out of focus, which tends to kill the scoring here, especially on still life subjects. A lower angle would have given the flame more life, and a chance to see the shift in colors of the flame, and perhaps a trail of smoke, here it reads as a little mote of white. Granted you would lose the rather nice reflection in the wax, but I think it would be a good trade off.
In response to your request for comments on this picture and what you can do to improve on your photography in general, I offer the following: Getting good and correctly exposed of any shot that includes a bright light source such as a flame is very difficult, but you have managed to get pretty good exposure here. My immediate reaction to this image, however, is that I want to see more. I think that this is too close of a shot and would have been better not cropped so closely and maybe it would have been better taken at a lower angle. The top leaf exiting the frame bothers me and it would frame the image nicely if the whole leaf was included. The container is there and at the same time it isn’t which makes me wonder, again, what exactly it is. As the picture stands right now it is boring (sorry for being blunt).
As for your other request, how to improve your photography: You’re doing it. Keep entering challenges and ask for critiques if you don’t get them. Keep in mind, though, that this challenge had a ton of entries due to the DPL. There weren’t enough comments to go around and the lower scoring shots don’t usually get comments that help much if they get any comments at all.
Peruse other images and see what did well and what scored poorly (start with the top and bottom 20%) and read the comments to understand why they placed where they did. Read up on the principles of composition and exposure and learn them well. Also, understand and learn how to use your camera in manual mode, or at least aperture and shutter priority.
I could keep going but I’ll let you get started here and let someone else pick up where I left off. Good luck and keep entering challenges.
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