Critique – Jason

Today’s image comes from Jason. I emailed Jason to see if there was any further form of contact, but he didn’t reply. If you are reading this Jason, feel free to leave a comment below if you have a website or gallery space anywhere you would like to direct people.

Here he has a photo of a couple in love. I like the fact that their hands are clasped. Compositionally, this is a fine image. I’m guessing there wasn’t much model direction here, but the fact that the man has his knee up is a definite boon to the image. The knee is a nice visual offset for the falling hair of the woman. I think the composition would actually be significantly weaker if his leg was straight. Her leg with the black leggings is another help for the movement of the eye, especially with the arms above them.

I am showing this as submitted, and you can see that a border was attached to the image. I would go without this and just crop to the photo itself. I don’t think the border adds anything. If it were printed, the frame matte would take it’s place. Plus, zooming in on the border, I can see it is rather blurry and pixelated.

Looking in closely elsewhere, I am not sure whether Jason added some kind of filter effect to the image, but there is some serious posterization here. What this means, is that the gradations are between, in this case, black and white have gone from a smooth range to regions of fewer tones. This creates quick changes between the areas of shadow and highlight here and generally won’t look good in a larger print.

This, like I said, could be caused on purpose by a filter effect or it could be from a rather cheap digital camera, particularly in very strong light conditions. Though, it doesn’t seem to happen on the girl’s leggings, but that might be because there aren’t any extreme highlights in that case.

Despite the posterization, there is a nice amount of contrast in the image. There are some nice blacks and only some small regions of the girl’s shirt have blown out to white. The rest of the skin tones are fairly nice in the midtones. The strong shadows on the rocks are another indicator of a strong sun in the scene.

The rocks are even enough to lend the focus to the two in the center of the image. The only distracting thing in this photo is this thing by the man’s foot. Is it the girl’s purse? or a piece of rubber base the rocks are on? I really can’t tell.

My only other mention is the focus isn’t very sharp on much of anything. I am again going to guess it is due to a cheap camera with less than stellar glass. Not much can be done about that in this case.


Again, thanks to Jason for today’s image. I hope he writes in the comments below. If you would like a photo critique, feel free to submit one through the critique contact form. Let me know what you think or if you have anything to add to the conversation, let me know in the comments below.

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© This article is copyright of Chris Lane Photo and should not be found elsewhere.

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Tags: Black & White, blur, border, composition, Critique, distraction, embrace, girl, guy, highlights, lovers, man, midtones, photo, photography, posterization, shadows, woman
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