wrote:
One4All wrote:
I'd appreciate it if anyone would care to critique the five photos at:

The first thing I did was put my company logo on Hallway and Dancers
and posted them on my website. Just kidding - I remember how touchy
you are about that.

Hallway- I wish you would have shot lower, maybe place the camera on the
floor. I am limber, I like to turn around and shoot between my legs. I
really like this one.

I shot "Hallway" with an inexpensive 35-mm Pentax film camera in 2003.
The problem with shooting low is that, given dimensions of the hallway
& limitations of my zoom lens, I wanted, at all costs to include the
tops of the arches on the left, with some space above them. They could
not be cut off.

For a lower shot, I would have had to tilt the camera upward, resulting
in the pyramid effect, narrow at top, wide at bottom. You may have
wanted that effect, & in fact, it may have introduced more drama into
the picture, but people, when they see that, assume the photog didn't
know what he was doing.

To avoid the pyramid effect when you shoot architectural subjects, you
must keep the film/sensor plane parallel with the vertical lines.
That's why most architecture is shot with view cameras, because while
the back must remain parallel, the front can be raised or lowered (not
tilted) to include as much height as possible at that camera location.

It was a challenge for me, wandering those halls where people like
Einstein and Hegel walked, with only my Pentax, to get this photo. I
raised as high as I could on tip-toe, keeping the film plane parallel
with the verticals, & getting the tops of those arches. I just exposed,
as I usually do, with what the camera's meter told me.

Dancers - If you have the raw you can blend two exposures for better
detail in the faces.

Yes, I need to go back & do a better job on those faces & I'll try your
suggestion.

Circles - I don't know what I am supposed to be looking at but I
took one look at the 24 tooth sprocket and thought it should be renamed
'Nowhere Fast'.

Obviously, you're a cyclist. : ) Well, at first I thought highly of
this photo, taken almost 30 years ago. (Yours is the first feedback
I've gotten.) I thought it was a great image of "found art," showing
pattern in seeming chaos. Your comment, "I don't know what I'm supposed
to be looking at...,"tells me a lot about what I intended and what a
viewer gets out of it. In fact, the more I look at this photo, the more
I see where you're coming from. I probably could do a better job, maybe
cropping it more. Also, I think the tonality is too dark, maybe even
too flat. Back to PS.

Bird - out of focus.

Others have pointed this out, too. sigh OTOH, what's wrong with a
little soft-focus in a photo like this, even if I didn't intend it?

Good luck,
Ron