Critique Thread No. 1

I like this thread, very clever.

Thanks to everyone that commented, quite a variety of different opinions and reworkings on the same image. When I have a moment to spare ( ) I'll return to it and rework it. I liked Mike's version of it, and one or two others. I feel the original does need some cropping, perhaps not as severe as the original crop. The jury is is still out, I feel, on the various colour/monochrome/toning options although I do now feel my original was too artificial.

The most interesting part to my mind was the variation on whether there was a strong enough subject or the image being too cluttered. Personally, I find myself returning to look at this image quite often, my eye picking up on new details, spotting new aspects of it. I will almost certainly have a version of this printed large when I finally have one I am happy with. It is clearly a "marmite" image.

As to lens choice, the slightly longer lens was chosen to get the window in a window effect. A shorter lens lost this. Also, the terrain rather limited options in terms of position etc.

Tim's comment regarding the PPG interested me most. When I first joined I was wowed by many lovely images. A year later I find myself largely bored by those images that get in (and very bored by my images that have been accepted). Yet another sunset, yet another bird photo, yet another flower... There seems to be virtually no street photos, no urban decay, no photojournalism... In short, nothing challenging, everything nice and twee. For example, my portfolio consists of five sunrises/sunsets, three pcitures of/in churches, three pictures of trees and two others. Am I being too harsh?

Cheers, Kris.

No. Standards have fallen.

G

I wasn't really arguing that standards had fallen (I haven't been around the gallery long enough to know), more that is it very "samey".

It was difficult to get a photo into PPG when it first started. Now it appears to be quite easy.

And, as you say, the judges seem to be going for very undemanding fare.

G

Like sending in a photo for a magazine, it is only easy if you give them what they want which clearly isn't decaying buildings!

K.

I'm not sure if those sort of images are harder to get accepted. Case in point: whenever I see a new name here on PUF with a PPG link in their sig I always have a look. Today I stumbled across snakebar's PPG, all of which was accepted in 2009/2010. Not very twee

Having said that I concede there may be fewer of the darker gritty images being submitted. Could it be that as the PPG has grown in popularity there are a lot more relatively inexperienced photographers submitting, and their (our ) images tend to be more traditional populist stuff?

Snakebar's images are indeed more interesting than I have generally come across on the PPG.

K.