Rottara

Hi.

I’m writing this in response to the critique request you sent to <img class="avatar" src=a.deviantart.net/avatars/c/r/c… alt="" title="Critique-It"/>.

What makes this picture interesting is in my opinion primarily its richness of colors. You created a very vibrant image which naturally attracts some attention. However, I think that some changes could give this photograph a lot more impact and really make it stand out.

First I want to address the geometry. You arranged crayon shavings in a heart-shape and placed the crayons around this heart with the tips facing it. The positions of the tips roughly follow the heart-shape, but I think you could do better. I’m sure that sharpening all tips would have helped you arrange the crayons more precisely, and it would have resulted in a more uniform appearance. Also, the heart made of the shavings would be more impressive if its outline hadn’t been drawn on the paper underneath.

The shadows of the crayons suggest that most of the light was coming from somewhere behind the reddish crayons. Since there are double shadows, two light sources must have been present and apparently both of them produced relatively hard lighting conditions. For this kind of picture I would recommend using a single, soft light source, preferably a soft-box placed above the crayons. This would result in a more even lighting with softer shadows.

Now I’d like to talk about some of the technical aspects. One of the first things I noticed about this photograph was that there’s quite a bit of noise in it. You didn’t include the EXIF data, but I would guess that (depending on what camera was used) the ISO speed was set to somewhere between 400 and 1600. When you’re taking pictures of motionless objects, this is really not necessary. Just use the lowest ISO setting and place the camera on a tripod or find some other way of supporting it in order to avoid blurry images due to camera shake. And if you absolutely have to use a high ISO setting, I recommend running the image through some noise reduction software such as Neat Image.

Since there’s not a lot of depth in this photograph, the depth of field does not matter that much. However, some of the crayons near the bottom of the image appear to be slightly out of focus. I guess one or two additional f-stops wouldn’t have hurt. The exposure is pretty good in my opinion, as is the contrast of the picture. The color saturation seems a bit high, especially for the red tones. I would selectively reduce it a little bit.

While I do like the simple composition of this photograph, I have a suggestion regarding the arrangement of the crayons. I think it would look better if the colors of the crayons followed the spectrum of visible light: Red, yellow, green, blue, violet, and back to red to close the circle (or heart in this case). You’d have to throw out some of the crayons you used (white, gray and black aren’t spectral colors) and add others (I’m really missing yellow in this photograph), but I think it would be worth the effort.

In a nutshell, I think that this is a quite creative piece of conceptual photography. There are some flaws, but since you’re participating in #Critique-It’s Re-Envision project, you will probably create a new version of this picture soon, and I’m confident that it will have even more impact than this photograph.

I hope I was able to provide some useful insights. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me.

*Argolith