Healing With Stonesby
mohanrComment by AP: Greetings from the Critique Club!
I'll start off by stating all the things that work for the image:
Effective use of use focus/depth of field, contrast that 'pops', an interesting angle, and recurring shapes throughout the image.
As for the "cons", I would say only that the narrowness of the crop is a tad distracting for me- just a bit too thin. Along with that, I'm slightly put off by the centered framing and how the 'action' of the photo, or the way your eye moves through the frame, is only up and down the vertical axis. Perhaps a subtly different composition would have changed this but I think it boils down to personal taste.
Aside from that, I'm afraid I can't really give more of a critique. What you have here is clearly a cool, unique shot, and it was received rather well in the challenge. The technicals are all in order, so there is no improvement to be done there, and what is left is really just what you have chosen for the subject matter and the photo that you created.
I would say only, that "out of the box" shots like this, the good ones anyway, do usually clump up around the ~5.8 mark in scores... they get enough 10s to buoy the score, but the majority of people will not spend a lot of time delving into the shot and just pass it off with a 5.
Factors that may have contributed to people overlooking this shot might be the inclusion of a male foot (kind of a weird subject), the pebbles themselves being sort of ordinary looking, and the photo being (I think at least) too long/thin - it is harder for vertical shots to do well... They don't always look great on the voting page, especially if a person has to scroll in order to view the whole image, and that puts people off sometimes. Again, non of these factors are bad necessarily from an aesthetic/artistic standpoint, they are a matter of taste & perception, its just that unfortunately the aggregate voter opinion does not usually reward it.
So in conclusion, a very worthy photo with some great depth of field effects and a definite "cool factor", but without enough "wow factor" to be catapulted onto the front page.
Photographer found comment helpful.
