The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!!! Please Critique

**theantiquetiger** · 10-02-2011, 05:19 PM

We do this every year, we go to the local produce market and take pictures in the huge mound of pumpkins

**theantiquetiger** · 10-02-2011, 06:55 PM

Couple more (I like this one of the girls the best)

**Bambi** · 10-02-2011, 10:49 PM

it's a nice set of what looks like a fun day. In all the eyes seem to be a bit soft but I think you could fix it.

IMO the best one is the second one - in the pile of pumpkins- it has great colour and tells a story for me. I like the one of the girl passing the small pumpkin but it's a bit soft and you cut off the bottom of the pumpkin and her hand.

I think you need to figure out the focal point (in this case the eyes) and really work on it.

**Mad Aussie** · 10-03-2011, 03:28 AM

What a cool little tradition you have going there! Love the halloween bows to go with the pumpkins.

I pretty much agree with Bambi's critique. I will add, for the 2nd shot, that the blown out top left section only detracts to the photo. That should be cropped out. Good composition is about what you include ... what you exclude ... and where you place the elements within the shot.

With people, and using auto focus, make sure your camera's auto focal points (usually red dots in the viewfinder) are set to one dot and then make sure that one dot is on the persons eye when you press to focus. If the eyes aren't sharp, the photo isn't good. You can see in the 3rd shot that the bows are nice and sharp but those big, beautiful blue eyes aren't. Such a cute shot that lacks due to those out of focus eyes. You can see, in photo 2 of the 2nd post, that again the focus has hit the bows perfectly, but isn't quite right on the eyes, although it is better.

**theantiquetiger** · 10-03-2011, 08:54 AM

Originally Posted by Bambi

it's a nice set of what looks like a fun day. In all the eyes seem to be a bit soft but I think you could fix it. IMO the best one is the second one - in the pile of pumpkins- it has great colour and tells a story for me. I like the one of the girl passing the small pumpkin but it's a bit soft and you cut off the bottom of the pumpkin and her hand.

I think you need to figure out the focal point (in this case the eyes) and really work on it.

I set the focal points on the eyes and the image looks much better before I uploaded to the site, so it maybe the compression of the site. I need to resize the images so the site does not compress it.

As for the first three images (they looked better in Gimp) do have a lot of flaws that I did not see earlier. The one with both girls and the mound missing on the top left, I wanted the mound to be shown like this to show the magnitude of the mound, but I do realize the background is way over exposed.

The image with Morgan holding the small pumpkin, I knew as soon as I saw it that I missed the pumpkin (it was missed in the original image, not cropped).

The bet thing I like about all these images is the richness of the color of the pumpkins.

I do like the gourd picture a lot.

**Marko** · 10-03-2011, 09:08 AM

I agree with bambi here - very nice colourful and FUN set, but seriously compromised by eye sharpness issues on shots 2-3. I also agree w/MA's blanket statement 98% of the time. (the 2% is if you expressly wanted unsharp eyes). If the eyes are soft the photo is simply flawed, move on to a new photo, or keep it only as a souvenir.

I do hope compression was the case here - Just as an FYI 275 k is PLENTY to get very sharp photos. It also helps keep people from printing the photos because all they get is mush with that filesize.
Hope that helps - Marko

**theantiquetiger** · 10-03-2011, 09:19 AM

So I need to keep them < 275kb? I've been uploading them a lot bigger than that (7-10mb), all my photos, the bees as well. I know the third picture of the first set, her eyes were marbled when viewed in Gimp.

I will re-upload this evening after I reduce the size and see what it does.

Thanks for the info

**Marko** · 10-03-2011, 09:27 AM

If you upload directly, YES they must be less than 275 K.

If you "call" the photo from Flickr or another 3rd party site they can be any size.

Personally I upload directly at about 200k or so.