I have ways of making you talk.by
electinaComment by Dr.Confuser: Greetings from the Critique Club. I have been assigned your photo to critique and here are my thoughts:
Personal Reaction: I confess my first reaction was, âHow does this meet the challenge?â Then I began to wonder what the table leg was doing in the background. Then, âWhatâs the black thing in the foreground?â In the end I puzzled out that the table leg was a wooden head with a mask, the black foreground object was a gun. Then the previously mysterious title made sense. Iâm still not sure what the round thing on the left is, a foreshortened finger or hand? This all took longer than most voters will give an image. I suspect many voters voted it lower because they didnât take the time to puzzle it out.
Composition: The composition was just okay. The gun (the main subject?) is almost dead center. Sometimes with highly symmetrical subject and compositions, this works well but often leads to static feeling composition. It doesnât work so well here. The tilted head in the background helps some; but not enough to rescue the composition.
Technicals: Focus is good on the hand (finger?) and on the gun. I like the shallow depth of field which blurred the head a bit. Lighting is good on the hand and head, but weak on the gun. On my calibrated monitor the only detail I can see on the gun is some scaring on the barrel and a bit of definition of the handle. If you are only hinting that itâs a gun, this is fine, but it made me want more detail on the gun which I couldnât see very well. If you look at the histogram for the photo, it is âUâ shaped; lots of darks, lots of lights, but little in the middle which leads to a high contrast image. I generally like photos like this but in this case you have lost some of the mid-tone detail as a result.
Conclusions: Woody was a whimsical challenge so maybe we shouldnât take ourselves too seriously here. Youâve submitted a whimsical image with a sense of humor which I like. Comments indicate that voters who âgot itâ liked it. The main problem was that it was subtle, possibly too subtle for most voters to spend the time on to appreciate. When shooting for a specific challenge, and
if you care about scores, try to be less subtle in how the image meets the challenge and make the image more quickly approachable. Toys and abstracts often turn voters off, so use them with caution.
As always, this is my personal opinion. Feel free to PM me if youâd like further dialog.
Photographer found comment helpful.
