judge my photography... please!

May 30, 2008 3:09 PM

What are good flickr groups to join for getting criticism about my photos?

I've been in a "rate 5, post 1" groups for concert photos and poked around a few others but all I really see is a bunch of back-patting and bad shots with even worse advice. I'd like a group where I could post a photo and find out what I did wrong where and what to do about it next time.

I'll be doing a photography minor when I go in for Bachelor's #2 in a couple years, but in the meantime I'd like to see what I can learn from within the flickr community.

Thanks in advance!
[if you want to judge me, flickr link is in profile and you can MeMail/flickrmail/email or send a pigeon or something.]

posted by heeeraldo to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Portraits.
posted by fixedgear at 3:21 PM on May 30, 2008

i think theres a group called technique thats pretty good - theres one called deleteme which is awful.
posted by sgt.serenity at 3:36 PM on May 30, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Not flickr-related, but I really like the Photography-on-the-Net forums, since I see you use a Canon. There are tons of pros and very, very talented amateurs on there who'll take the time to give you good critiques of some of your best shots.

Just another offhand observation, after glancing at your photostream: you could probably pare it down a lot. One of the marks of a good photographer is taking a ton of photos, which you obviously do, but then selecting just the few best shots to display. You seem to have a lot of shots in a row that are very, very similar to one another. Just pick the best one of each angle/subject/whatever, and delete the ones that look nearly identical. I'm also not sure what the point of shots like this are.
posted by booknerd at 3:55 PM on May 30, 2008

What booknerd said. Learning to edit yourself is huge. I worked as a photo editor for my college newspaper and we had some good photographers working for us who would give us 300 nearly identical shots of a basketball game, requiring me to wade through all of it to find the good stuff. No one wants to see that much. Find the few shots the really shine and just show those.

Doing this has two benefits. One, others who see your work get a much better sense of it and are more likely to react positively to it. Two, it helps you get a sense of what you like and dislike about your own photography. You can look at your successes and try and figure out what exactly it is that draws you to those images so much.
posted by pwicks at 4:14 PM on May 30, 2008

When I have a photo or two and I'm just trying to figure out what went wrong or how do I fix it I send it to fix my pix on flickr and people post fixed versions on I fixed your pic. It's very very hit or miss, but having a few people do different versions can be useful to me, but I'm a real beginner at a lot of this stuff so ymmv.
posted by jessamyn at 4:18 PM on May 30, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Try TWIP Critique. It's an offshoot of the This Week in Photography podcast that seems to be filled with some constructive stuff. In one of the older episodes they said that creating a thread with your photos is the best route to getting quality critiques. Good luck.
posted by sdsparks at 7:15 PM on May 30, 2008

hahaha Yeah I was going to say DeleteMe is the group you want for absolute harsh criticism---they will find anything and everything that is wrong with the photo and make you feel like a retard for even posting it... You might get some useful advice from it, but mostly it's just douchebaggery.
posted by hulahulagirl at 6:53 PM on June 2, 2008