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I disagree about light being a subject: Photographer Alexander Harding has a beautiful project titled “Visible Light” in which he turns light itself into the subject of photographs. (From an article in Petapixel)
Your point is well taken, though. It always gets down to personal preferences on the part of the photographer. Not that we are necessarily good judges of our work. As was recently pointed out on LS, we can add a layer of emotion that we felt at the time of taking the picture that can obscure the merits of the photograph for us, but not for our viewing audience who does not experience that emotion. Also, the more we look at a photograph, the more we tend to like it.
It is not strong enough for me. If it were odd natural lighting, which this one might be, but I can’t tell from context, then I might have a different take on it.
Congratulations! It is worthy of recognition.
Ho, boy that is the truth and then some.
I am struggling to find a subject. Probably it is what I internalize as odd lighting.
That is a pity. I have a leveler that I can put on my viewing screen, as an option. Taking a level picture is important enough to me that I am willing to give up valuable “real estate” on the screen to have it. I really believe that pictures taken on level, even when there are not horizontal or vertical lines in the picture, tend to be better than non-level pictures. As an alternate method, line the horizontal edges or vertical edges of the screen with the line you want level, like the horizon on the edge of a building.
Tom, I write a blog about street photography and one of the topics that is queued up is, “Flip It?” The blog arose from me reading an article by Barry J. Brady about ways to improve a street photography composition. The first way he suggested was to compose so that the viewer’s eye moves left to right in a composition. That can generally be accomplished by flipping a picture in post processing, assuming, of course, there is no text. This would be a perfect example, and yet you do not favor the flip. Why is that?
I am going to try to do my own thing on this critique. Let’s start with parts, because parts are parts. Background A+. Great texture, no bits of light that are distracting. (Well, that will have a qualifier later.) A perfect color palette. Placement in the frame A+. Great diagonal that the right wing and left tail feather form. Compositional geometry: A+. Love the oval body. Superb diagonal lines. Focus: B. Thank you for having reasonably good focus on something, in this case, the tail feather. My eyes need a landing place. A tiny bit better focus would have increased the grade. Post processing: not as good, but hear me out. You have picked up motion on the hummingbird’s bill. That does not work at all for me. It looks like his mouth is gaping open. That bit of light, in my judgement, should be taken out. I did not count that as a background issue. With parts finished, the overall effect is creative. It resonates with my sense of being a hummingbird. It is hard to take a unique picture. I wonder how many millions of hummingbird pictures there are out there? Not so many like this one.
We really veered off here, didn’t we?
I definitely prefer the panning shot, but that may be a decision based on compositional strength. There is much better light and placement of the subject in the panning composition. I am not especially good at either one. Hats off to you!
This kind of work is always fascinating to me. The color palette certainly works for me. I love text, so that is good. I agree with Paul that there is something of a a black hole on his face. Fairly small n-1. The tombstone does not work so well for me. I know it is supposed to be telling me something, but I am not sure what. I did just complete an online application for a Russian Visa. It nearly killed me. Maybe that is true for this Work Visa?
Delicious blocks of color and they are sufficiently in focus to work for me. I agree with Richard about the crop. When the strip of blue frame is taken out, so will the reflection on the street, which I find very distracting. The n-1 is the guy on the left. In this case the stride did you wrong. It produced an awkward arc of red. The third person coming toward the pair takes away some of the clean simplicity of the image, but not enough for n-2. Enough Sharktank! I think this falls in the category of abstract images and rises above small compositional observations. Well done, Maureen.
There are some nice diagonal lines in this image that increase the sense of movement. Two of the people are in stride, which is actually also the creation of diagonals through the V of their legs, and highly desirable when composing pictures of people walking or running. I generally have a personal preference for some part of the picture to be in relative focus. Either you focus on the wall and the people move through the picture or you pan on the people and the blur of the wall gives the sense of motion. Neither of those things happened. It may have been to dark to successfully do that. In any case, I think catching motion is largely experience based and most of us do not pursue it enough to get really, really good at it. There is little story here so the composition has to do the big pull. It is a solid composition. If the people had been evenly spread apart and there was no gap between the pairs, the sense of compositional connection and the pattern would have carried the day. As it is, I find it pleasant to look at and, if it were mine, I would keep it.
Thank you, Eric. We will see where this orphan leads me.
You are absolutely right, Federico. It took me awhile to understand that this particular orphan is actually a part of a group of orphans. This I know. It is an issue on my mind. I just have to find a way to present.
Brad, I can really see your point. Thank you!
I think you are right, Kent. For some reason the experience in that market made a deep impression. But there really is a troublesome turn for me. I look at a lot of street photography. The bast majority of it looks all the same to me these days. When I have a composition that is different, good or bad, I think I am drawn to it.
