from a backwater of the Critique Club
Well, one has absolutely to agree with most of the comments already made. There always seem to be Coke cans or bottles in any challenge, and I guess your chosen set-up meets the challenge - I would recommend trying to get a bit further away from the obvious perhaps, as that very fact will have hurt your scoring here somewhat.
Your lighting and composition really do need work I'm afraid, at least as shown here. Compositionally I think you've made several little errors of judgement that combine to make the image not effective at all. First off, you've chosen a very ordinary point of view: we always see these things from this angle - alongside and slightly above. Simply getting lower and shooting from the same level as the cans - or even slightly upwards from absolutely the ground - would have helped change things, and made the image stand out some more. Secondly, whilst the detail and ficus is fine, the rightness just isn't there - and that area of floor/carpet/whatever around them seems like a mistake: we don't get all of that surface to see, especially surrounded in black, and what there is is so indistinct as to only look like a mistake. Your framing of the two cans seems without point: I realise that you've tried the rule of thirds thing, but an image doesn't just need it's subject placed at those lines - and arguably you've actually placed neither of your subjects on those strong lines.
Lighting is the big issue here, for me: you've managed what might inother subjects be an interesting glow - it seems almost directionless, yet lights the bits we need to see. However I don't think that such a moody atmospheric feel suits your subjects at all - again, especially with your chosen point of view. It might have worked with a radically different view-point, but if you're going for the 'ordinary' then you need, I think, 'ordinary' lighting - except that photographically, 'ordinary' lighting is actually reasonably hard to achieve. With a 15 sec exposure you evidently have at least something to put the camera on, and so making a very basic soft-light wouls help this kind of shot enormously - something a simple as a piece of white paper taped over a desk-light would work. The best recommendation is to experiment with such things.
I hope this is helpful
Ed |
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