Critiquing My Own Efforts

Andy was nice enough to post a complementary comment about the second (the cactus) image posted yesterday as a bit of a self assignment. I thought it might be worth seeing what I could say about my own work.

Before I do that though, Andy commented on it being tack sharp - it is in fact a series of five images blended with Helicon Focus - with the focus shifted gradually from the nearest tip to the middle of the plant (but not the back). It did a superb job. It doesn't always. I tried the same technique with the egg and it resulted in ovelapping and blending errors - I suspect because of the lack of sharp lines upon which to align (I know it was hard enough to manually focus).

Rather than provide a pedantic description of various aspects of the print quality, I'm going to take you through some of the thoughts that I had as I edited the image.

I had great difficulty cropping the image just right - often a warning that compositionally it is weak (otherwise there would likey be an obvious way to crop), I just didn't feel that the shapes of the image quite came together. I was bothered by the lack of balance. The light from outside was coming from the right, the fill was from the left and above. The left side of the picture was much darker than the right and considerable work had to be done to correct this.

I'm still not happy with the blurred areas in the right bottom which isn't complemented by an equivalent blurred area on the left, but at least in editing I matched the brightness to this isn't as obvious a flaw.

Tonally was quite happy with the image and even more so after applying Akvis Enhancer. My first attempt I increased the highlights control but while it separated the highlights (the needles) better it increased contrast too much and I redid the enhancing with the default settings and toned them down to about 50% and was much happier.

I think I have cropped it the best way I could but were you to make a sketch of the major shapes of the image, I don't think you'd see interesting patterns (see prev. blog about this technique for composing).

Does the image excite - hardly, but it's nice. It shows things closer than we normally see, it turns the cactus into a pattern rather than a plant. I'm happy enough showing it to people but I'd not include it in any submissions to galleries, magazines or whatever.