Critique the Community

Beauty

Submit your best beauty photo for your chance to win a free Fstoppers tutorial
  • Submission Deadline: Fri, 24 Aug 18 03:45:00 +0000

    This contest has ended.

  • Voting is closed.

  • Congratulations to the winners!

    View Results

Your next chance for an image critique is here. Submit your best beauty photos to receive feedback and a chance to win an Fstoppers tutorial of your choice. 

Excellent beauty photography comes down to the perfection of detail in a model's face. We have always admired the work of Julia Kuzmenko McKim, whose work is featured above, as an example to be followed when it comes to beauty photography. While her portfolio is full of 4 and 5 star images, we want to see the full range of images from Fstoppers members this week. Between now and August 23rd, we invite you to upload two of your best beauty images for a chance to be critiqued by the Fstoppers team and to win one of two free Fstoppers original tutorials. The first winner will be based on the highest rated community image and the second will be chosen randomly from the entries. 

After images are uploaded, we encourage all community members to scroll through and rate them fairly yourselves. The quickest way to do this is by using your keyboard's arrow and number keys. Feel free to leave feedback of your own in the images comment section but please keep your words helpful and encouraging. We're all growing in this creative process together. 

  • Submission Deadline: Fri, 24 Aug 18 03:45:00 +0000

    This contest has ended.

  • Voting is closed.

  • 467 people have cast a total of 31,259 votes on 361 submissions from 227 contestants.
  • Congratulations to the winners!

    View Results

42 Comments

Incoming: Lots of beautiful images of pretty girls with lips slightly parted and blank expressions on their faces.

Someone that comments this is always the one with zero photos submitted and takes photos of stuffed animals for their community college course in photography.

Good luck to you if you think the Fstoppers critiques have anything to do with relying on the 1% models available.

Learn the communication skills necessary to engage with people and be honored enough to have them sit in front of you. After that, come back here and post a photo so you can add some worth to the community.

I'm sorry, who are you and why would I give a damn about your opinion again?

Clearly you completely misunderstood the nature of my comment so maybe you should crawl back into whatever hole you came out of and develop a sense of humor before engaging with people you don't know based on a comment that clearly went over your head.

Good luck to you if you think everything that everyone writes on the internet is some sort of serious critique. Must be a hard life to live.

P.S. I'm here to pass some time. I couldn't care less about adding "worth to the community".

P.P.S. I uploaded a single photo just for you. Hope you enjoy my contribution to the community. :)

You don't give a damn about his opinion but you wrote a long answer however.

Yes, I did. And?

Nothing just noting the incoherence of your thinking.

Perhaps I'm just an incoherent person.

(BTW, that wasn't really a long reply by any stretch.)

300+ comments by someone and still just a stuffed animal posted... seems like I called the bullshit out when it stunk the most.

Watch out, he wrote a blog post about you.

The concern is sarcasm, the blog (unfortunately) is real.

I can’t wait for it to go viral on Build a Bear .com

Why you got to go be knocking Build-A-Bear? It's a wonderful place to spend time with family.

I'm not an expert nor have I ever pretended to be. :D

Any chance of Julia being a guest judge?

Julia Trotti?

I think Wayne mean Julia Kuzmenko McKim,

I think Wayne meant Julia Roberts.

Julia Stiles

Unfortunately I don't think we'll be able to get her to guest judge this round.

You shouldn’t be allowed to vote 2 or 1 without some CC
I feel like people just vote 2’s so their 3 photo will do better.

Completely agree. I just uploaded a picture and the first vote was a 1. I don´t claim my picture is a 5 or anything. It could perfectly be a 2 for some people and it is perfecly fine, but 1, a snapshot. Come on. People downvote on purpose. I believe that if Fstoppers removed the prize for the highest rated image among the community (and changed it for the highest rated image for them), people would start being honest about the ratings they give.

yeah there's someone that is voting 1 to everyone, if it keeps this trend the "winning" picture will be the one who manages to get at least 2 stars lol

To be fair, I'm finding that the ratings they give more or less equal what the audience gives

The biggest problem is with the rating scale itself, nobody reads it and a “2” is actually a “good” photo it just needs work.

The scale needs to change to a 2 being a 3 because rarely do you see 4-5 star images. Even in the critiques you see them rate 2s and the photos are cast away like they’re trash. 2s are an opportunity to teach the community what’s wrong instead of just throwing it in the garbage. There was little to no real help or critique in the automotive contest and was painful to watch.

If people read the guidelines on voting or if they were changed to adapt to what people are actually rating photos, it wouldn’t be a bad system.

I think 5 increments is not enough to capture photography ranging from a blurry snapshot taken at Disney World by your mom with a disposable camera to Ansel Adams...

Frankly speaking, the 5-star rating in the current system is pretty useless. How many photos will actually be "World Class"?

So if you consider that most people will probably only effectively be using a 4-star rating system, if you're averaging anywhere between a 2 and 3, you're doing well for yourself.

I completely agree. To get a solid 3-3.5 it’s pretty damn hard. You don’t see many.

I'm having a similar experience. There should be an automatic adjustment for how harsh or how easy an individual votes in any one contest.

If a member's voting average is 1.5, a rare 3 is actually more like a five. If another member's average is 4.5 then a rare 3 is more like a 1.

Agreed. My guess is two things 1) People who submit photos give other photos a low rating to elevate their own. 2) Rookie photographers are jealous of professional photographers and give great photos a low rating to make them feel better. LOL

Very odd in this modern day world that you have the gift of mind reading and the motivation behind it. But it would make a good circus act.

When you write "You have the gift of mind reading" isn't that you doing the very thing you're accusing Vance of ?

It was satire friend and even if I was serious there was no accusation in my words. However when someone makes that type of editorial rant. when you spot it you got it. What I think the gentleman did was exposing Himself at being a cynic

He said it was a guess. Admittedly your attempt at satire went over my head.

Probably, but how would one enforce that?

I agree, and also have a body of work to back up that CC. Its easy to criticize, but much harder to create work from an idea or vision.

My two cents as a new member of the community is: when you give a 1 or 2 star rate, you should also give a critique, or your vote wouldn't be valid.
I really do like the 5 stars rating system. 1 stars and 5 stars should be rare than the others, you would have a better accuracy about your piece, and the patch you should follow to improve your skills.

Can. I submit more than one?

It states​, "Between now and August 23rd, we invite you to upload two of your best beauty images for a chance to be critiqued by the Fstoppers team and to win one of two free Fstoppers original tutorials."

Thank you sir

I really wish we could get critique from Julia to improve our work. Because if there is no critique then we won't know what is right and wrong in our images to improve in future.

So one winner by community and one winner by judges including Julia. So instead of the "random winner" replacing it with a Editor's pick kind of thing and then critique of like the top 10 images by Julia

I'm with you on this one. It would be nice to have her CC especially after watching the automotive critique video.

Sometimes you'll get good CC from people on here. I haven't gotten too much myself and even in one video my photo got destroyed by them but it's art... you can get mad or keep in mind you do it for yourself!

This lot of photos is the worst yet in terms of fitting the genre.

Out of 300+, there may be around 65 or so beauty photos with the rest being portraits, headshots, and random trolling.

If these contests are going to be legitimate, and not a waste of time for judges and entrants, the voting system and qualification criteria have to be overhauled.

Contest Submissions

Click on the thumbnails below to comment and vote on each image.

Click here to learn about the Fstoppers rating system and what each star value means.