Reply To: Constructive criticism appreciated!

[nesgran]

Right, are you a professional photographer, aspiring or a happy hobbyist? It sounds like a company name on your flickr

To start off, I like your Welsh lake pics in BW, I like the composition of the shot with the geese and the pic of the kid with the camera is cute. Most of your BW landscape pictures work except maybe not the one with the church and the one with the bench.

Your portfolio has a number of problems though, first off would be the first four people shots. They are severely over edited and do not look good. It looks like you’ve tried to do lots of fancy things with a jpg which has completely fallen apart during the manipulations. Highlights are blown and the tonality has gone completely wonky. From looking at them the two outdoor shots have a massively overexposed sky, a fill flash would be your best friend in this scenario. The self portrait looks weird because of the background that doesn’t seem to belong and the  photo of the guitarist looks like it was done with a cell phone anno 2006.

Of your portrait pics I would say the only ones I think work are the kid, “benjamin blake” and “skyward”. The rest have the same blown highlight and serious overediting or end up in the category of snapshots (like the kids dancing). The snapshotiness of a lot of the pics like all the kids dancing, the swan and a few others drags the overall quality down. Nothing wrong with snapshots, in fact I took several hundred today, but it isn’t something I would have put in a portfolio looking for critiques. Not every shot can be great after all.

I can see that you are a sound photographer however your editing and your selections are letting you down a bit. If I were you I’d re-edit the editing disasters if you have RAW files for them, if not in the bin they go. Then get rid of the snapshots and add a few more high quality shots and you’ll have a solid portfolio.