Opinions and grains of salt

One of the first and hardest lessons to learn in photography is remembering that "art is subjective" This school that I am doing is a correspondence class (you send your pictures into a professional photog and they tell you what you can do better) and that can make it a little challenging to argue in defense of my pictures. It doesn't happen often. Normally I agree with the critiques and maybe even see them coming. But I have had a couple of photos that I was very proud of that were given a bad review.

This picture is one that I am very proud of. The assignment was to emphasize the subject by blurring the background.  The subject here is the baby's face. His expression, not the whole baby. The critique was that the baby was cute but "you cannot crop into the human body that much, especially the head" My thought are, that if I zoomed out to include the whole head, it would take away from his face. Maybe that's just me, but I know that this baby's mom loved this picture and I feel comfortable saying that if this had been a paying gig, this would be a photo that they would be happy to pay for. ( as a matter of fact I think the did pay for it on snapfish so there lmao)

  And then there are photos like these. I personally like this picture (obviously or I wouldn't have turned it in). The assignment was to emphasize the subject using size and off center placement. I was out for a walk at a local nature trail and I walked by this little grove of Quaking Aspen trees. The all had these "eyes" staring at me as I walked by. What I really wanted this picture to be was the one eye emphasized with the background slightly blurry, but I wanted the other trees eyes to be visible as well. As you can see my depth of field was a bit too shallow for the eyes in that background but having met the requirements of the assignment I chose to turn it in. The critique was "there should be more interesting lighting" (I can agree with that the picture is a bit flat) and "I should have turned the camera vertically because the tree grows up and down" Ok pump your breaks. I don't agree. This review came from the same man who told me that you camera should be turned the same direction as your subject (ie vertical for a water fall, horizontal for a truck) Well the subject here is the eye not the tree. Plus if I had turned the camera vertically, you would see less of the trees in the background.

The lesson learned here is, be objective. that even if it is a professional photographer critiquing your photos, take what they say with a grain of salt. Listen to the advise given and take that into account and if they don't love a picture that you do just remember, you could have 10 different photographers look at your picture and get 10 different responses.