I do a lot of pondering. I am quite certain I have a busy brain. For better and worse that runs in my family. There is certainly a whole lot of time to think right now. I usually lock onto a topic in photography and think about it obsessively for about a week, then move on. This is working well relative to getting blogs written. This week I am thinking about critique. Ironically I wrote a blog on critique, How To Critique a Photograph, almost exactly one year ago today. Perhaps this my annual November thinking activity.

I literally cut my photography teeth on a photography critique site. I have mentioned it often. It was the Shark Tank Forum of the website, Lightstalking. This was years before I started doing street photography. For the hobbiest photographer I give it my highest recommendations. The requirement of the forum is to provide constructive criticism. If you can only ooh and aah, you need not chime in. The community is knowledgeable and kind. There are members of the community who are professionals who give back through their critique. I left when I got interested in street photography because this was a new genre for them, and honestly, they did not know how to critique street pictures. My guess is that they have no trouble evaluating street now.

I am also looking for musicians. This is a fairly nice environmental portrait. I got eye contact.

Here are some things I learned in the Shark Tank.

Do not put your best and dearest photo up for critique. That was often a rookie mistake. Newcomers would put up a photo in the belief that no one could possibly find anything wrong with it. Let me assure you, there is always a constructive observation to be made.
Do not put up your worst photo for critique. Really, go for one that you think of as a solid image, but still think it could be improved.
The bigger you are, the harder you fall. This little idiomatic phrase only roughly applies. Basically, if you are a beginner photographer, you will get one kind of a critique. If you are an advanced photographer, you will get an entirely different critique. It still has to be constructive but there will be no holds barred.
You have to be realistic about your ability to receive criticism. We had a member of the forum who did beautiful work. He had good observations about the work of others. He regularly put up his work for critique. He never accepted anyone’s observations and would get testy with them. That was tiresome.

This is my favorite image of the day. I did get the triangle of heroes and a good gesture. There is probably little point in putting this up for critique. There is no plus in doing anything that takes away my happiness with it. The white bag does n… — This is my favorite image of the day. I did get the triangle of heroes and a good gesture. There is probably little point in putting this up for critique. There is no plus in doing anything that takes away my happiness with it. The white bag does not help, by the way. White can be a composition killer.

I am now going to move onto some observations about the peculiarities of critiquing the Design elements of street photography.

Street photographers do truly march to a different drum than photographers from other genres. Good composition, which I like to call Design, is not an absolute requirement. The free spirits will tell you that rules are meant to be broken. True, but that does not mean that you will prosper with a portfolio that disregards the principals that drive human beings to look at and like what they see. It is all the familiar stuff: the rule of thirds, odd numbers, focus on the face, attend to contrast, etc. But it is more than that for us. Our viewers will often be looking at complicated scenes that they have to make sense of. I happen to be in the camp of using geometry to sort things out. Implied triangles in a composition help me narrow down what I am looking at. Lines lead my eye, which give you a little extra viewing time. They also help set emotional responses. You are going to get a very different response from me if your lines are all horizontal as opposed to all diagonal. Your subjects, which I call heroes, need to be separated from each other and from the background. If you don’t do that, I may not be able to find the reason you took the picture. Goodbye, I am off to the next image. I also dislike feeling off balance. If your Design has balance, you have a much better chance of keeping my attention. Juxtaposition gives me a chance to laugh. And admire you as a photographer. Are these legitimate points of critique in street photography? I tend to think so, because in the end, our success in taking street photos rides on keeping the viewer’s attention as long as possible.

Dedicated to Street

As I See It - Thoughts on Critique of Street Photography