Zen Bokehby
breckinshireComment by Konador: Critique Club
This photo does technically have bokeh, as it displays round balls of out of focus light, but their connection to the subject of the photo seems non-existant. If you look at some of the high scoring photos, you can see a link between the subject and the bokeh. The level to which you have met the challenge is the most basic level, which goes part-way to explain the low score you got.
The photo itself, ignoring the bokeh challenge element, is also flawed in a number of places. You obviously used a shallow DoF to get the background out of focus, but in doing so you also made the edges of the head out of focus. As the black onto a light background is the highest contrast point in the photo, it should be in focus as it's what draws people's attention first of all. Also, in resizing for the web it looks like you have lost sharpness in the details of the face. Try running USM at about 150%, 0.4 radius, and 0 threshold to see if that improves the sharpness.
There are a lot of pieces of dust and things on the face and the bowl which are distracting. Since this was an advanced editing challenge, I would have suggested you cloned them out to give the appearence of a cleaner photo.
The lighting on the face is good, enough to bring out the details but not too much, so we can still see its dark black appearance. The exposure on the foreground white powder is good too as detail remains. The problem is that the bokeh in the background is very overexposed and is the brightest part of the photo and draws the eye over there away from the subject. This would be okay if the bokeh in the photo was more interesting, but at the moment there is nothing really there to look at.
The subject you chose (figurinne) rarely does well on DPChallenge as people see shots of them as 'cop-outs'. It's a good attempt but with some major flaws. Good luck in future challenges!
Photographer found comment helpful.
