Thread: LGK Photography Challenge #2

Alright, so I am going to go back and try and give more rigorous critiques in hopes that will be a more useful bit of feed back (and I hope I will get some as well). Some times it stings, but you learn a lot more from someone saying "yeah, that doesn't work for me and here is why" rather then from the nice to get but not very helpful "great image!" I do think there are a lot of great images here, and I have been greatly impressed by many of them, but I wonder how much we are learning if none of the feedback is critical. And besides, according to FBJ's rules, you can't get your panties all in a bunch

FBJ:

Tribute To X-WingCameWest: Top O' The LGK Heap

This is actually a re-shoot of an image I captured a month or so ago.
See the original version here.
Off-camera flash, tripod, black foam-core background, and a little tweaking of black
levels and contrast in Lightroom.

While the reshoot is cleaner, I don't know if it works with this image. I liked the wood floor in the first one, the black background feels a little floaty to me. I liked the warmth that the floor provided, it worked nicely with the blocks. I may be off base with this, but I think blocks are inherently children's toys, a the little bit of disorder that was happening in the stack in the first shot reenforced that feeling.

Wetro

Nikon 70-200 f/2.8, 2x teleconverter, monopod, galoshes.

I do like this shot. It depends on which screen I look at this on (so it might be a hardware problem on my side), but on my calibrated work screen, it feels over saturated to me, back off on the vibrance slider and I think you are there.

Circles Of Color

Off-camera flash, 12mm extension tube.
I'm not even sure I like this shot, to be honest.
Others from this series of images are here.

One thing that is missing from this shot that is in some of the closer ones is being able to see the tooth of the paper. I think that a slight compromise between the two might be nice, as the paper is half the subject, but not so tight on the crayons as you are in _GCC1498

What Are The Odds??

I like what you are trying to do here, but for me I'm not sure there is enough "meat" in terms of objects in the focal area (just the top 1/4 of frame). I think if the portion in focus occupied just a bit more of frame, it would feel more visually satisfying, give my eyes a little more to chew on.

Stars Upon Thars

I might just be a retard, but I have a hard time keeping focus on this image, my eye is pulled all over the frame, because there is so much happening on the periphery. Perhaps if you pushed in a bit, it might be a little more settling for the eye.

Tile Mosaic

I think with this image, the fact that the frame of the tiles isn't square enough to frame to read as straight, and not skewed enough to read as intentionally skewed, it reads (to me) as a bit snapshotty, like you weren't concerned with framing.

Ruely:
I would say try to get the lighting off your camera as much as possible. Anything you can do to move you lighting away from the axis of your lens, the better. Tape a piece of tissue on there to increase the effective size, or just turn it off if you can. Learning to work without the onboard flash is a great skill to have. It is hard, but very worth the effort.

Big Joe:
I didn't see that you had new additions, you could always drop a new post letting us know to take a look so we don't miss any new ones you have. I'm not sure the new radio image is quite there yet. I am curious if it is just a discrepancy between your lenses, or if there is some difference between your lighting. For the brick shot, it feels to me that the subject should be the brick itself, yet the center of frame is mortar. Anything you can do to make that brick the hero brick would help. Center it, or perhaps shoot it at an angle with a wide aperture so you can isolate the brick with a narrow depth of field. With the dog, the bricks encroaching in the lower left feels a little distracting from me. A slightly tighter crop might help this a bit. I think seeing them in frame just a touch could be interesting, but perhaps not so much into frame. There also looks like there is a bit of motion blur on the shot.


OVB:
The crop is better, but I bet you could go even further, perhaps almost half the glass. Get the composition a bit off centered (but still balanced) so it doesn't feel quite so static.

I would actually like to see this inverted. I think one of the strongest things about the Tack Attack series is that you leave the viewer wondering how you did it, and this one might be a little more interesting the other way around.

I think this suffers a bit from the blacks being pushed a little too much. It almost feels like the pins have been cut and paste into the image. I think if you allowed a little more room for the darks in the image (don't push that black slider up so much), you might see the velvet / duvetyn, but that might make the image read as a little more believable that it is actually happening in camera.

You have already commented on this yourself, so I won't belabor the point, the time of day and the sun conditions make this shot difficult. Switching from the Away theme to the Woot theme, this shot works a little better (with the away theme, there is no boarder on the image as it blends into the background), but if you are going to the graphic look, perhaps you could give it a boarder, or some sort of matting to set the image off a little.

imamonsta:

The keystoning that is happing with the case is a little distracting (the camera is a little low pointing up, so the sides of the case converge toward the top of frame). I think if you can't get the camera high enough (not enough tripod), than you might want to change your crop a bit so it isn't quite so distracting. As for the treatment of the image (the Lomo look), I think with this subject, it is close, but not quite a right on hit for me. I think if you were going this route, I might prefer to see the image posterized, or some treatment like that. As it is, the Lomo look is half way in between the two worlds, and not being one or the other, it is a little distracting for me.

Deuce:

I like the DIY lightbox, but in this case, the lighting feels a little too even. There isn't any directionality, I'm not saying there has to be a lot, but I would like to see either one side lit more than the other, or slightly more focused light so we get a little more shadow definition. Lightboxes are great because they make it easy to get great, soft, even light, but there downfall is that can result in a lighting situation that is a little bland.

\_==o IxxI

I think with this image, I'm not given a strong subject to focus on, and so my eye tends to wander around the frame. For me, to get this image to work, I might try something like making all the field M&Ms one color, and the hero M&M different a different color, and perhaps size. Something like that, something that will cue us to think "this is what I want to look at" and have something that our eye can settle on.

Puckmonkey:

With this image, with the shutter open for so long, there is no way you are going to be able hide the background, so I think if you found one that worked a bit better with the image, it would help you out. In other words, make sure that the background is something you want back there, not just what happens to be there.

I think with this one, because you are forced to shoot through the mesh on the microwave, you want to have it work for you as much as possible. I feel for me, if the camera were square to the mesh, the pattern that the mesh makes would be square to frame, and therefore might be more interesting as part of the image, instead of distracting from it.

Blurker:
I do like the first image in your set, the lighting is great, and I think with the right crop it could be really strong.

I think with this one, it a little too between being a straight on view, and being a perspective view like the first image. I also feel that in this one, the LEDs are the brightest thing in frame, so my eye is drawn to them, yet they are just slightly out of focus. I think if you want that 1st or 2nd knob to be the focal point, you need to narrow your depth of field a bit to highlight that area. As it is right now, my eye is a little lost in that image

rinkrat:

I like the sign shot, but I think with this one, the focus on the 36 36 Club sign could be reinforced a bit if the depth of field where slightly narrower. As it is right now, you were shooting f/2.8 on that shot, so you are already wide open, but you are shooting at 17mm, so the sign is already past the hyperfocal distance of the lens at that zoom, and everything is in focus. If it were possible to step back, zoom in a bit, that might help to throw some of the foreground and background out of focus a bit, and with the stepping back and zooming in, that might get the Euclid street sign out of frame.

PuckHead27:

Landscape shots in this weather are hard, because they often end up bing low contrast due to all the atmosphere. Beyond doing some photomagic in something like Photoshop, I think a simple crop might help here. If you cropped of the top of the image, where the background is fading to gray, you still get a lot of the rainbow, and retain the high contrast portion at the bottom of the image.

The colors in this are great, but I think that the viewing angle is disadvantages for the lighthouse, as it makes it feel probably shorter than it is. Of course this might not help you at all because this might have been the only place you could get a shot of the lighthouse, but if at all possible, try and get that camera low so something like a lighthouse looks nice and big.

Again, I hope no one gets offended by these crits, I have just been hoping for someone to come down on me, as I think the best way to learn is to see the mistakes that you have made so you can work on correcting them in the future. I'm also just one person, so in the end my opinion doesn't really matter. If the image looks like the way you wanted it, that is all that really matters. There are fantastic images here, and my hope here is that with a little crit here and there they can get even better.