Learning to critique an image is a skill just like taking a picture is. I’m a big fan of critiquing other people’s images because it helps me learn to see things in my own pictures — you can suffer a bit of blindness to your own images because you’re familiar with the shot and the scene it represents because you were there. It can be a lot easier to see details in someone’s images than your own, but once you do learn that skill, it’s a lot easier to turn it back on your own images as well.
David duChemin is a canadian photographer who talks and writes about composition more than the geeky EXIF details of a photo. he’s founded Craft and Vision as a publishing company with a lot of interesting (and inexpensive, most around $5US) ebooks about various aspects of photographer.
He also has started a podcast where he takes an image and talks about it. It’s a fascinating thing to listen to if you want to see how a trained photographer looks at and deconstructs a composition in an image.
The latest podcast (#8) is the first of two where he poses a series of questions that he asks about every image as part of his critiques, and it’s a fascinating introduction to the language and questions you can take to evaluate and critique an image. It’s well worth your time to watch and see how he does it and adapt some of his thoughts into your own critiques.
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