Reply To: Critique

[nesgran]

I’m afraid positive critique is not what you need, you have a watermark indicating a professional outfit yet you are looking for the critique of a mom with a camera. You need to start getting proper critiques to progress anywhere with your photography which is still lacking at the moment. Getting a proper critique will sting but you will benefit from it in the long run.

Your biggest problem is your editing. All editing has to be subtle for it to work unless you go bananas but that is hardly journalistic style. For journalistic style event shooting it is ok to clone stamp a few spots away or small distracting elements in the photo. Sure, it wouldn’t stand for a newspaper but it needs to be done for this kind of use. The reuploaded version of the girl looks a lot better but the eyes look disturbing. You can now see that the flash you used (shoe mounted or pop-up?) has helped with the look but also that her waist is now where your eyes are drawn as her face is darker. A few seconds with the burn and dodge tools would sort it out.

Second would be your technique and/or gear. I can’t say for certain what your settings and gear are since there is no exif left but it looks like you may want to consider using longer focal lengths for portraits which would help both in terms of subject isolation and giving a creamier bokeh but also in compressing the scene. Apertures used aren’t that inspiring either, I don’t see the backgrounds melting away like I’d expect