Critique the Community
Environmental Portraits
Submit Your Best Environmental Portrait
Rules & Prizes
For this critique/contest, we want to see your best photos of environmental portraits. Every image must include a person and ideally they would be photographed in an environment that represents who they are, where they work, what their hobbies are, etc.
Each photographer is allowed to submit up to 3 images. The highest-rated and one random image will win a tutorial from the Fstoppers Store.
Featured image by: Pete Coco
Sat, 09/11/2021 - 23:45
New submissions are closed.
127 people have cast a total of 6,186 votes on 207 entries from 105 participants
Winners have not yet been announced.
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.
30 Comments
I actually need more "alone time" than I have been getting. I greatly enjoy getting together with friends and family, and I really like the people that I work with. But too much of that without enough time by myself starts to wear me down, emotionally.
Hoping to get out into the wilderness this week to photograph some Pika and Hoary Marmots on the talus slopes. That should give me the chance to "get back into my own head" that I so look forward to.
It is a widely accepted term and has been used as a category for photo contests for decades. I think that qualifies to use the word literally. To me the idea of the applying the term 'portrait' to wildlife is inaccurate.
Outside of a zoo or exotic pet, isn't it accepted that "wildlife" are already in their environment?
Yes, it is reasonable to assume that wild animals are in their environment.
But just because an animal is in its natural environment does not mean that the photos that wildlife photographers take of that animal will be photos that are meant to showcase the environment.
Most wildlife photos taken by serious wildlife photographers are NOT environmental portraits, because the main point of the photos are not to showcase the animal's habitat.
If I take a close-up portrait of a Mountain Goat in beautiful alpine habitat, it is NOT an environmental portrait, because it is a close up and the background is blurred out and occupies a very small area of the frame.
Likewise, if I take a behavioral photo of two buck deer fighting, and those deer are in a beautiful shortgrass prairie of rolling hills, that is usually NOT going to be an environmental portrait, because the photo is composed in a way to showcase the action of the fight and not the habitat that is surrounding the deer.
If I was taking an environmental portrait fo the fighting deer, instead of a behavioral photo, then I would probably shoot with a wider angle of view, at a smaller aperture for greater depth of field, and I would also change the position from which I was shooting so as to show the rolling hills to advantage.
If you read the article at the link I posted in my previous comment, you may be able to understand this easier.
"If I take a close-up portrait of a Mountain Goat in beautiful alpine habitat, it is NOT an environmental portrait, because it is a close up and the background is blurred out and occupies a very small area of the frame"
No one is debating closeup portraits versus environmental ones. Even if the portrait submitted to this contest was closeup it would be rejected/downvoted because it did not showcase the environment properly.
Even if you submit a wildlife photo, you wouldn't enter a closeup because you know that isn't the theme for this contest.
I get what you're saying though, but thems the rules.
Yes, Bruce, exactly!
Homo sapiens is free to upload their images on contests organized by other species…
I dont understand the tanturm. There has been plenty of animal contest to submit to. Are you feeling exculded from the chance to submit your work?
Hello, Teresa
I don't feel all super worked up over this .... not at "tantrum level".
I just particularly like wildlife images that are environmental portraits, over and above most other types of wildlife photos. So when a contest comes along that is all about environmental portraits, but expressly excludes environmental portraits of wildlife from submission, that is disappointing to me.
I would have loved to see folks submitting environmental portraits of wildlife along with the environmental portraits of humans. There are so many species of mammals ... why limit a contest to just Homo sapiens?
As far as whether or not I feel excluded from being able to submit my work, well, that doesn't really bother me. There's always the chance to post to so many other places and to submit my images to all of the stock agencies.
It's just that it is a little (little means not at tantrum level) frustrating to see so many photo-sharing sites that are so human-centric, where photos of people so overwhelmingly outnumber those of other mammalian species.
“If an image has been “lit” with external light (besides a direct on-camera flash) it is at least a 2 star picture” - Fstoppers rating system.
A lot of images posted here have been “lit” with external light. Square lighting system can be easily seen reflected in the eyes. So why are people giving only one star for these pictures?
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I don't think anyone really goes by that "lit" rule, especially in these contests. If the submitted image breaks the concept rules, it'll most like get hit with 1's no matter how well lit it is. For example: a perfectly lit studio shot will most likely get a very low rating in this contest.
Not to be that grumpy person, but while there are a lot of great photos here, there are so few true environmental portraits. It might be helpful for Fstoppers, when launching these contests, to provide some example images.
You’re more than right. Fstoppers must show some examples coz some people trnd topost great shots out of topic and the beautiful thing is that they get voted very well. So ironic
To be fair, they did mention it in the rules.
With that said, I've seen enough of these contests where you can say submit photos of rabbits, and folks will submit photos of cows.
what time is this aired live?
Hello where can we see results are they still doing it on youtube long time i did not see any notification about this episodes
they've moved critique the community to the fstoppers live channel
You mean on youtube or where can I find it ?
yeah, on youtube
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJxlKgtWbX9tKicPEYiRSOw
So have they posted the video yet? I haven't seen anything on either channel
lol is this contest dead?
Yes, of course it is dead. It ended way back in September - 4 months ago.
RIP