Photocritic photography blog

Hi folks!

(if you don’t care about the history and background and what to expect, just scroll down to where it says ’submitting photos’)

A little bit about the Photo Critique

As you have noticed (you’re reading this post, aren’t you?), we’ve started doing photo critiques here on Photocritic. Initially, I was sceptical to the idea, as I didn’t think it would be very suitable on what essentially is a photography blog, but then I ran a poll, and the results were staggering:

People do want their photos criticised by someone who knows what they are talking about (or at, I waffles on enough to be able to pretend I do), and I really, really appreciate that.

In addition, I realised that perhaps photo critiques are a fun way to develop a blog. The thing is, I’m not just writing a critique of the photos, I talk about the reasons why some things are more important than others, how you can improve your photography in general, and fill the critiques with links as well.

In summary, I believe that genuine, well-meant photo criticism might be a platform which would be conductive to something that can be readable, educational, and interesting - not only to the people who have their photos critiqued, but also to everybody else.

Who will be critiqueing the photo?

For now, it’s just me - Haje Jan - who does the critiques. For one thing, I’m not interested in a free-for-all slagging match over the photographs, and a pure photo criticism site isn’t what this is about - try PhotoSIG or DeviantArt if you want a higher chance of feed-back.

What kind of photos will be critiqued?

To be fair, I’m aiming for a middle ground. If someone sends me a perfect photo, I can post it up and say ‘wow, it’s wicked, this is why it’s so good, and….’ I’d run out of things to say really quickly. In other words, I’m not really that interested in critiqueing photos that are already perfect.

On the other hand, if I get an overexposed, badly framed webcam photo of someone’s tits, there isn’t a lot I can do to critique it (other than saying my well-practiced ‘nice tits’ line, which never gets me anywhere), so I think we’ll leave them out of the critique as well.

What I’m looking for, then, are photos by people who are in the process of developing as photographers. Photos they are generally happy with, but which leave something to be desired somehow - whether you know what a photo needs (and you don’t know how), or whether you just aren’t sure why your photos aren’t quite coming together, it makes no difference - those are exactly the ones I’m looking for.

So, how do I submit a photo?

I need the photos in a reasonable resolution (I’ll be using them in 600×600 on the website, but it helps if I can look at higher resolution files to look at various things a little more up close), in JPEG format (or PNG, if you prefer, but I’ll be converting it to JPEG anyway).

If you do any editing to your photos (sharpening, levels, cloning, whatever), that’s cool, and it’s part of the overall process of creating a finished picture. I don’t even need to know what you’ve done to the photo, because it’s the end result that matters - everything else is irrelevant.

Select 3-4 of the photos you want to be critiqued, and e-mail them to hajejan+critique@gmail.com. Include your name, where you are currently, and a little bit about the equipment your photos are taken with.

When submitting photos, you grant me a non-exclusive right to use and manipulate the pictures you submit for the purposes of doing a photo critique - I won’t be using your photos anywhere else, and you keep full copyright of the photos, of course.

Finally, unfortunately I can’t guarantee that I’ll use your photos, sorry - we get quite a lot of requests, and I cherry-pick the ones I can build a good blog post around, so it’s not your fault if they end up not getting used.

Wow, that was an amazing critique! How can I ever thank you?

Post a comment in the post where I critique your photos, and let me know if and how it helps you become a better photography, that’ll make my day.

Of course, if you want to, you can also make a donation, but that’s entirely up to you - if you feel you should be spending your hard-earned money on buying lenses and photo gadgets instead, that’s what you should do :)