What fun...

[mosesma]

I just joined this forum, and I gotta say, what a great idea to do a critique discussion...

I'll post a few shots I've taken. I'm not anywhere near a real photographer, I just take photos for the fun of it. However, because of my work, I spend a lot of time thinking about WHY people take photos. For me, I take photos because they help me remember, they help me see with an open heart, and sometimes the photos I take end up amazing myself.

These uploaded photos are - a quick shot I took of my girlfriend and then I added the bebe logo and gave it to her as a Valentines Day present, another is of a clown I saw at a fair, a picture I took of a friend for a brochure I'm laying out for this conference I'm producing, and some pretty desert scene I couldn't resist snapping.

So please tell me, am I any good at this? And I know, no matter how much fun it is... don't quit the day job...

[natatbeach]

1) pic of girlfriend - too contrasty and too saturated I DO like the pose and the concept (that was sweet) and I like the feel of it...I wish it was a bit more in focus and her skivvies were either a different color or not there at all (they are kind of distracting)

2) parade shot --- I think I wouldn't chnage a thing on this...I think the composition and colors are very pleasing especially the colors and textures from the outfit are beautiful...

3) product shot-- I'd like to see the focus in reverse...the girl slightly blurred and the phone (?)
in sharp focus...the phone is a distraction like I can't tell what I'm supposed to look at...the lighting on the model is nice though

4) landscape --- the composition is nice but it looks overly saturated ....

look forward to seeing more of your work...

[PuckJunkey]

You definitely have a good photographic eye.

My favorite of the lot is the clown shot by far and wouldn't change a thing, as "nat" said.

The GF is a very interesting pose / expression on her face. I knew when I looked at it that you probably knew her somehow. That said, it is a bit contrasty and -- IMHO -- a bit to "cataloguish" in the sense of showing her lingerie. Might've been better to just have her pants unzipped, but no so "pulled down"? It's all a matter of personal taste really. I always feel that less is more with these kind of shots. Just a hint is all you need. ;)

I will say the product shot is a bit unremarkable. Your real eye seems to lie in the capturing of "real moments" rather than scripted ones, but this has as much to do with the genre as the photographer. Product shots like this are almost always unremarkable IMO.

The landscape is pretty good. As I suggest when critiquing myself and others who do landscapes... I think zooming in / getting a bit closer might've aided this composition. Colors look a tad retouched to me, but still believable.

[mosesma]

Thanks so much for your feedback, I really appreciate it!

That clown was on stilts, made the shot easy.

And the GF shot was interesting because it was spontaneous, she didn't put on makeup and we did the shots in ten minutes. She's a sculptor, and a lot of the credit goes to her, because she has so much experience posing her models that she knows how to pose herself intuitively. She's also very very comfortable with nudity. The intended audience was for her alone, so I wanted to make it look *just* like a bebe ad, all contrasty and catalogish. I even photoshopped it into a photo of a bus stop, where these ads are often displayed in San Francisco, which she thought was hilarious.

The interesting thing about the product shot is that I did the shoot to optimize for the model, and without the correct product because it hadn't shipped yet. I then photoshopped the correct phone in later, in perfect resolution. I'm the executive producer of this conference on cameraphones (www.c-summit.com, you can see some of my photos used on the site), and when I showed our backers my photos for the brochures and ads, they thought my shots were better than the work done historically for them by an ad agency they use. We ended up saving quite a few bucks, hopefully leading to greater profitability.

Thanks again everyone! What is it they say? Art is not a passion, but a priesthood.

Moses