Hi, I submitted a few shots for pentaxphotogallery.com. All of which, were declined. Since the official gallery doesn't offer an option for critics to share why it was declined, I figured I would post here. Here are the photos that were declined:







And what I felt was the best of the bunch:


All I'm looking for is suggestions on improvement, and your honest and brutal opinions on the quality of the shots. The above shots were exactly as submitted to the gallery.

[Karl Inge S]

I`d have given #1 thumbs up even if the background is busy/messy. I think theres great depth and colour in the flower. The others are more godd ideas then godd pictures, but thtas up against the pentax gallery so its no bad judgement from me.

PS:
I`ve submissed 4 photos to ppg, 3 are declined the fourth I dont know yet...

PPS: The first chapter here is so badly written, please take it in the best way.

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Last edited by Karl Inge S; 12-14-2007 at 09:10 AM.

[craftsmansky]

it would be intersting to know how many "accepted" artists from the ppg are members here....mike cash has fessed up. are there others?

[janver]

Unless I overlooked this, composition hasn't really been mentioned as a weakness of these 4 pictures. They all present a subject "dead in the middle" of the frame. No creativity on the compositional part, I fear

Jan V.

[MRRiley]

I've gotten 10 through the process, some early on, some more recent... It is getting tougher every day though... And sometimes it is pretty painful wading through and voting on what some people submit. There is some genuinely beautiful work being submitted but 95% of the submissions are little better than snapshots and some is outright C*R*A*P!!!

Now, critique-wise for the photos in question (which by the way are all close to being "good enough" in my opinion...

1. DOF is the issue here... and given the "depth" of the flower itself this would have been hard to get right. The obvious intent is to have the stamens (sp) and the purple fringe in focus with the background out of focus (OOF). Many have said that the background isn't OOF enough. This is true, but note that part of the pruple fringe does go OOF so the background is about as OOF as it can get while keeping the rest of the flower in relative focus. I might recommend a wider lens and trying to position the flower so that the actual background is much much farther away.

2. The main issue here is the bright green leaf in the lower left foreground. It competes too strongly with the obvious subject.

3. I actually recall voting YES for this one as it is technically good exposure-wise. The elements are all exposed nicely. However I think it's problem is that there is just too much "distance between the person at the bottom and the statue at the top. Visually it seems to take a long time to view the photo.

4. This is a neat abstract but i think the bit of text that are still present are pretty much meaningless so it just becomes an exercise in texture. If part of the text had been meaningful it might have gained the "meaning" required to allow the viewer to connect to it.

Just my thoughts and opinions of course. Have you had any luck getting anything accepted since you submitted these 4? Hope so, but if not, keep trying and good luck...

Mike

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Last edited by MRRiley; 12-14-2007 at 12:37 PM.