Ma! Ma!by
cvhs99Comment by Bear_Music: *** C R I T I Q U E C L U B C O M M E N T ****
There are aspects of this image that are very appealing. It's areal moment seized, it has an immediate and intimate effect. The composition is pretty good, for the sort of environment it's in. But there are a couple of issues here that are negatively affecting your score.
One of them is totally challenge-related; the child's facial expression denotes worry more than play. She doesn't look happy, basically. That had to hurt your score, I think.
Speaking of the image itself, there are technical problems that are killing you. For one thing, the most important element in the picture is the face, but it's noticeably out of focus. The tab on the gate (?) behind her is in sharp focus. The camera is grabbing focus on a contrasty part of the scene, and not on her face. If you set your AF point to the one where her face is, you'd be fine; this looks like the camera is set to evaluate all points and focus on one it "likes", which works okay for landscapes, say, but not at all well for in-close wotk like this where DOF is critical.
An even greater problem is the fact that the child's totally in shadow and underexposed. And because she's lit only by reflected light from the sky, which is very blue light, SHE'S blue as well. Now, it would be possible to fix this in post-processing to some degree, by shifting the hue'saturation over and so forth, and by using contrast masking and such, but there's a better way for the future; you want to learn to use your camera's built-in flash as a "fill light". You will need to play around with the flash exposure compensation (read your manual) to reduce power on the flash so it doesn't overpower the scene, but the D50 is definitely capable of doing a workmanlike job of fill flash.
Here's a very quick 'n dirty remake of the image; I used contrast masking (there's a description of it in my "Landscape Learning" thread) to bring up the tones on the child. I used a selective color adjustment layer to remove cyan from the "neutral" range. I used a tool I have called "focus magic" to correct the OOF image. Total time about 3 minutes. So there IS potential in the image, although the sharpening will not look natural at any larger print size.
I hope this has been of some help to you...
Photographer found comment helpful.
