Critique the Community
Adventure Photography
Submit your best adventure image for a chance to win a free Fstoppers tutorial
Congratulations to the winners!
Twenty adventure photographs were chosen and rated by the Fstoppers team. Do you think the feedback is fair?
The two highest community rated images for this episode were both submitted by Mads Peter Iversen. Since he is an Fstoppers writer, we decided to give the next highest rated photo the Fstoppers original tutorial prize. Congratulations to Marian Ragan for taking that spot. We'd also like to congratulate Dan Finn for being chosen as the winner of the second tutorial prize.
If you were unable to join this contest, submissions are now open for the next episode featuring underwater photography. It doesn't matter what your subject is, as long everything took place under water. This genre is considered by Patrick and Lee to be one of the most difficult in photography to photograph well. If you'd like your chance to be critiqued and potentially win a free Fstoppers original tutorial, submit your underwater photos HERE.
Rules & Prizes
Although adventure photography is a pretty niche part of the photography industry, we want to give it the spotlight in our next episode of Critique the Community. Let's hear what the community says about your pictures.
If you're unfamiliar with adventure photography, you're probably not alone. The genre largely includes the more strenuous types of outdoor activities such as rugged hiking, rock climbing, or kayaking; note Michael Destefano's featured image as an example.
Between now and September 14th, you may submit up to three of your best adventure photographs for a chance to be both critiqued by the Fstoppers team and win one of two Fstoppers tutorials. The first tutorial winner will be the community member that submits the highest rated image. The second winner will be selected at random. We will select a total of 20 images to provide feedback to.
After you've submitted your images, take a few minutes to scroll through the rest of the submissions to rate and comment on them. The easiest way to do this is use the number and arrow keys on your keyboard. Please keep any comments you leave encouraging and helpful as we're all growing in the craft together.
Fri, 09/14/2018 - 23:45
This contest has ended.
545 people have cast a total of 38,670 votes on 653 entries from 344 participants
Contest Submissions
Click on the thumbnails below to comment and rate each image.
Click here to learn about the Fstoppers rating system and what each star value means.
78 Comments
You may also like this blog https://goo.gl/Ww5u11 which covers 3 top adventure photographers and how they have captured images of awe, wonder and raw beauty that one comes across very rarely. Visit the instagram profiles to see the collection of such photos.
1. https://www.instagram.com/chrisburkard/
2. https://www.instagram.com/kpunkka/
3. https://www.instagram.com/krystlejwright/
It is not great. Most people just post a Landscape and expect to fool people into voting for them :(
lol...this is a tough category to have a compelling image. As others have stated, there are some 3-4 star landscape images on their own, but I give them 2 stars because they don't tell the story of "adventure". With that said, there are a lot of 1 star snapshots posted too. In many of the previous CtC contests, I had no problem dishing out 4 and some 5 stars, but I'm finding it hard to even give some 3 stars. Many 1 and 2 stars on all of the 375 images I rated so far.
agreed don't just throw up a landscape because its in some remote location there should be some content or even human activity associated with the image
I am sorry but the majority of images are not in the spirit of the contest................
Yep, there's quite a few, I don't even rate them to help speed up time to look for adventure photos to rate.
What is adventure photography. For me, there has to be some kind of action, people on adventure of some kind. For me it is not an adventure photography going on a three days hike and take pictures of the landscape. That is landscape photography, even if you had to go on an adventure to take the picture.
Adventure photography has to be about showing the adventure where the person(s) on the adventure is an essential part of a picture.
You don't have to be on an adventure yourself, as long as you capture other peoples on adventure with your camera.
how does a shot of the Milky Way that took weeks of planning to be in the right spot at the right time and an alarm to wake up at 3am get voted "snapshot" come on guys if you hate it that much tell me why
The people voting here are either voting down pictures to increase their chances to win the tutorial, or to troll people. The third options that they are morons and have no idea about narratives, real adventure and vision. It's only about technical stuff here. They put your picture into the category "oh milky way, seen a thousand times." The problem is, you spent so much energy for it, but in ages of instagram, people fake everything, take the apple star wallpaper and badly composite it into other images. That's how people lose the sense for it. I gave your picture straight away 4* as far as I remember! Don't give a shit...my pictures are also voted down. They are not as great as yours, but people voting here are mostly jealous morons who cannot appreciate other people being better than them. Your picture is awesome, mate!
Make sure you also can handle 1 star ratings as well as 5 star ratings before you apply for competitions.
Hey I appreciate the kind words! I look at these as a way for us all to improve, but at the same time it's like a 1 is a totally different thing. I am fine with 2s but like the feedback aspect. Oh well, I do still get some constructive criticism so I will keep it up!
"adventure" is subjective and means different things to different people. In my humble opinion, getting up early and doing some planning ahead of time isn't that adventurous. I'm speaking in general, not sure I've seen your pic yet. I do love milky way shots though.
I think i give this a 1 rating...the foreground is out of focus, the stars don’t look sharp either, there doesn’t seem to be a story here other than the blurry Milky Way...it reminds me a lot of my own attempts at night photography where i just take a photo of something random because the sky looks interesting but there foreground is off and there’s no real story...if anyone can take a photo given the same gear (ie tripod and dslr) then I think its a snap shot...
Hopefully this wasn’t too harsh...I think a lot of people don’t give feedback on 1s because they don’t want to come across as jerks...
Take a look at my photo that I entered of my wife swimming in an alpine lake. I love this photo, probably one of may favorites i’ve taken. It was taken before i had any dslr gear and was only using a holga. We did a 5 mile hike up a mountain to get to this amazing mountain lake. It was a great time, and afterwards I spent a large amount of time scanning the negative and cloning all the dust off the scanned jpg.
But it’s getting a 1 and that’s totally ok. I get it, it looks like an iPhone snapshot with an ig filter...(although it was taken before all of that existed)...i love this photo but would i put this in a portfolio if i was trying to get adventure work? Nope. Is there feedback that I could take and re-edit or try to change the same photo to make it a 3, probably not...
Not too harsh, the origonal comment was more directed at how stupid the rating system is and how people are not following it. I guess it has just seemed like these contests are entierly pointless. Anyway I appreciate you trying to give feedback, I know the tree was in focus, it may have moved a bit in the 10 secs of exposure but I know it was in focus, the stars look right to me too viewing the larger file even. I wish I could have found a more interesting foreground to hang out on as you say.
The problem may be in your own mindset and how others percieve your image.
You said you planned for weeks to get that image of the Milky Way but the “adventure” of getting the image is what the genre calls for.
Your image belongs in astrophotography.
The way he describes the image, it's very much like the sample image of a guy walking in sand, which is far from screaming adventure, and reminds me of many snapshots I've taken while on a walk. I just feel like this was a poorly structured contest.
I would call 10 miles at 12,000 ft at 3am an adventure... If I am totally honest it doesn't actually matter but I don't understand how that picture could ever be rated a 1 based on the definition of a 1. All my photos for this contest are under a 2 right now and none of them qualify as "snapshots" all 3 required a tripod which as stated in previous videos as soon as a tripod is introduced a 2 becomes the minimum. but then getting ratings of 2 aren't helpful unless there is some comment left, which is how I rate. anyway lots of weirdness in these contests it doesn't seem like most people are here to help each other and learn which is a bummer.
I'm new to Fstoppers and agree with your sentiments about the rating system and the lack of people wanting to help others. Regarding your and others thoughts of adventure images I would say that the composition would need to tell the story of adventure, rather than than the backstory of taking the image being adventurous. In this contest I think there's a couple of images of a paragliders and the like which are perfect adventure photography shots. An image of the milky way (while almost always requires an adventure by the photographer) would be classified as landscape unless there's some other compositional element that tells us about an adventure being undertaken. Great job spending the time to take images and get a shot you're wanting. As I you keep practicing and learning this willingness to be uncomfortable to get the shot will take you far in your journey.
The rating system maybe should be expanded and redefined for these competitions then haha your comment on composition would make it so that good pictures that would fit in adventure could do well but not as well as good pictures that make you feel adventure.
You can’t get mad about people rating your stuff poorly. That’s just this community and their lack of care in rating with no critique.
If your photo captured the “adventure” you keep saying you had to go about to get the image, then it would fit the genre. Since you can’t tell what you did or anything about the adventure to get the photo, in the photo, it’s just astrophotography.
Nobody cares about your adventure if we can’t see it in the photo. That’s as blunt as it can be put. You eating a cliff bar at 12,000ft while setting up your gear would fair better in this particular genre.
Well said Eric.
Dillion, I think what you're frustrated about is that you're taking the "1 being a snapshot" too literal, we know it says "snapshot" but don't take it that way, we all know it's not a snapshot, but most of us don't believe it fits the category of adventure because when we see your image it doesn't come off as adventure, comes off as landscape/astrophotography even though you explain the adventure to us the image doesn't capture that. But if this was an astrophoto contest I would rate it as a 2 because it does need a bit of work.
I think that there's a lot of discrepancy on deciding what is adventure and what not, and it will always be, since it is quite a subjective matter.
Bearing this in mind, maybe if some kind of "Doesn't fit" button appeared right next to the 1-5 stars, would give the community some kind of tool in order to mark some pictures as not apropiate for the contest. I think that this would be better than to actually "onestar" or "twostar" a beautiful image.
If, just to say a number, the 33% of the contestants/voters rate an image as not apropiate for the contest, some automatic email might be sent to the user to inform her/him that the image would be withdrawed from the contest.
Just my two cents, thanks for reading.
I couldn't agree more with the notion of a "doesn't fit" button. This is a community but it's also a community contest, and each contest has a theme. When we, the raters, don't think an image fits the contest, it's hard to rate it high - since the highest rated image in the contest wins. We, or certainly, I rate them low or don't rate them at all. People always interpret art and a genre differently, however, other will always submit pictures that simply don't fit the genre. A "Doesn't Fit" button would give people the option to still see and give a rating and benefit from peer review.