Hi!

It’s Jaymes again, coming at you on the fifth day of spring/autumn (according to the vernal equinox, when the sun passes directly above the equator and there are an equal 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night), depending on your location! 

How have things been? Have you had a chance to get out with your camera recently? 

Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to take any photographs this past week; I’ve been focused on getting my image catalog more organized in preparation for the warmer weather, and that’s eaten up a lot of my free time. 

(I don’t know about you, but opening my image-management software to find a messy catalog just feels bad. Getting things cleaner and neater is like a breath of fresh air!)

Oh, and just in case you’re looking to get out with your camera more but are struggling to decide what to shoot, I wanted to send a link to one of our articles: 100+ Things to Photograph in 2024! Hopefully that’ll help you generate some ideas/inspiration. 

Anyway, in today’s newsletter, I’ve included our bi-weekly challenge, as well as a few critiques. I also wanted to ask a question:

Do you have a portfolio website for your photography? And if you don’t already have a website, would you be interested in advice/recommendations for creating one? I’ve recently been working on some of my personal photography websites, and it occurred to me that members of the dPS community might be able to benefit from some recommendations - what do you think?

Let me know - and in the meantime, let’s dive in with our bi-weekly challenge:

The dPS bi-weekly challenge: blinding lights

From Sime:

We’re taking it back to a theme we tried before, but we didn’t get a lot of people give it a try! I’d love for more people to try this time around... and if you’re having trouble – something new here – share the photo that you made (but don’t like) in our Facebook Group and ask for help. It’d be great to see people that can offer advice and suggestions for improvement helping those that can’t...

YOUR THEME FOR THE REST OF THE WEEK: LIGHT PAINTING. 

Make sure you include the hashtags #dPSWeeklyChallenge and #dPSBlindingLights in your post on the Weekly Challenge page or over on social media. You can tag us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter!

Two more photo critiques!

As long as folks continue to send in photos, I’ll keep critiquing them - so this week, I have two more to share. 

Before I get started, I want to say thanks to everyone who sent in images! And for those of you who would like to see your images critiqued, feel free to hit Reply to this message and send along a file or two!

By the way: If you do send photos for critique, make sure you mention that in the email body or subject line. I receive a lot of images over email, sometimes with very little context. I don’t want to accidentally critique an image that wasn’t sent for critique purposes, so unless I am confident the photo you sent was indeed meant for public sharing, I’ll skip over it.

(Also, when sending files for critique, please make sure that they’re JPEGs and at least 1000 pixels on the long end!)

With that out of the way, let’s proceed with the fun stuff!

First, we have a beautiful sunset from Neville: 

What I like:

• First of all, Neville, you’ve chosen a very nice evening to photograph; often, it’s easy to get so blown away by the beauty of the landscape that we forget to choose our sunsets carefully. You have some wonderful clouds with lots of texture, not to mention some amazing purples and oranges.
• I also like how you’ve included some “anchoring” elements in the foreground/midground. In other words, you didn’t photograph only the sky - you included the palm trees and the houses, which give the image greater depth.  
• That distant cloud on the horizon is absolutely captivating - it looks like a hazy mountain!

What could be improved:

• With sunrise and sunset photos, it’s often difficult to maintain lots of detail throughout the entire image, simply because our cameras aren’t great at rendering very light tones and very dark tones in the same frame. I think that’s impacted your image a bit here - on my monitor, the palm trees and houses are very dark, whereas the bright part of the sky is close to pure white. I’d encourage you to work the image a bit in post-processing to try to bring out some detail in the shadows, as well as to drop the highlights in the sky a bit. That way, you can balance out the shot more. (Depending on the original file, it may not be possible - that’s why it’s always good to shoot in RAW and bracket your sunrise/sunset images if you can!) As an aside: With a scene that includes such a bright sky and such a dark foreground, I’d generally recommend an HDR approach, where you capture multiple photos of the same scene at slightly different exposures; that way, you can blend the images in a program like Lightroom and get a perfect final exposure!
• I like your choice to place the horizon lower in the frame - it helps emphasize those majestic clouds! - but to my eye, it looks a little too low. I’d love to see a bit more content in the foreground. If you were to point the camera slightly downward, so that the horizon lies nearer to the rule of thirds gridline, the houses and the palm trees wouldn’t feel like they’re in tension with the edge of the frame, and the whole image will feel a bit more balanced. (If you wanted to do this without losing any of the sky at the top, you could consider orienting your camera vertically.)

Second, we have an eye-catching street photo from Jesse:

What I like:

• First of all, Jesse, this is a great grab - I like the way the figure is surrounded by a very monochromatic environment, and yet there’s that amazing pop of red!
• I also think that when it comes to street photography, it’s easy to get caught up in focusing on the geometry/composition of the scene and, in the process, lose some of those human moments that make a lot of classic street photography so compelling. But your image goes beyond that - not just because of the rain and the eye-catching umbrella, but because the figure is walking with the umbrella in one hand while using their phone in the other!
• I love how much depth you’ve managed to create here. If you’ve been following these critiques for a while, you’ll know that depth/dimensionality is a big deal to me, and your use of foreground-midground-background layering (especially with that bridge in the distance!), as well as the stretch of pavement - with its subtle leading lines - in the foreground really makes this feel three-dimensional.   

What could be improved:

• One minor note is that the image looks to be a little crooked (it’s tilting to the left). That can be fixed super easily in post-processing, though!
• I mentioned above that I really appreciate the interest created by the phone in one hand and the umbrella in the other - I would be inclined to let the figure get a bit closer (or to use a longer lens), just so that becomes more visible! It’s a great detail, but I’m worried that it’ll get lost in the scale of the overall image.
• One other thing that I encourage street photographers to focus on is the positioning of each element in the frame, but especially the positioning of human figures (and even more so if there’s only one). Here, I’d recommended trying to keep the figure from overlapping with the left end of that structure under the bridge in the background; that point of overlap can create some visual confusion and unwanted tension. (If you were to move a bit to the left, for instance, the figure could be fully framed by the structure, rather than sitting at its edge, which would simplify things and give the shot a bit more oomph.) Relatedly, I wish the umbrella wasn’t so close to the platform on the water - that’s another point of tension/confusion that a slight shift in position could handle. Of course, it’s easy for me to talk about these things while sitting at my desk, and much harder to react in the moment, but the more you think about little perspective and compositional adjustments when reviewing your images, the easier it’ll get to incorporate them in the field!

Once again, thank you so much to everyone who sent in images, and I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

Talk to you next Saturday,

Jaymes Dempsey (and the dPS team)