Critique the Community

Landscape Photography

With Elia Locardi
Submit your best landscape photos for a chance to win a free Fstoppers tutorial.
  • Submission Deadline: Fri, 27 Apr 18 03:45:00 +0000

    This contest has ended.

  • Voting is closed.

  • Congratulations to the winners!

    View Results

Lee and Patrick are currently traveling the world filming a new landscape photography tutorial with Elia Locardi. This offers us an excellent opportunity to put Elia on camera and critique your landscape photos. 

Elia Locardi has been traveling the world, shooting landscapes, and educating photographers for over six years in dozens of different countries. We are giving the Fstoppers community a chance to get their images in front of Elia and receive some feedback. We invite you to submit up to two of your best landscape images below. In addition to entering to be a part of the episode, you may also win one of two Fstoppers original tutorials which we will give away. The first tutorial will be given to the image that receives the highest rating from the rest of the community. The second tutorial will go to a randomly selected entrant. Once you've uploaded your pictures, we invite you to scroll through the rest of the images and give your own thoughts and ratings to your fellow community members. 

  • Submission Deadline: Fri, 27 Apr 18 03:45:00 +0000

    This contest has ended.

  • Voting is closed.

  • 421 people have cast a total of 37,111 votes on 606 submissions from 369 contestants.
  • Congratulations to the winners!

    View Results

62 Comments

Lee Morris / Patrick Hall - Anyway to decrease the amount of auto-resizing the site does for uploads, or at least these contests? My panos detail gets killed on the resizes.

Same here!

How to remove a photo submitted to a contest - didn't realise it was a landscape contest.

Go to "Edit" and remove photo or delete entry. Something like that.

Any clue if you delete an entry, will it let you enter another photo?

yes, it does! ;)

Yes it will but you have to delete it first.

so it is landscape/cityscape right?

Patrick Hall How much cityscape would be permitted?

Interesting to see the difference in rating, looks like people are much harder here than in the community.

Edit: I get that people are going to be harsher here just like the guys will be in the video, but I see some images here that are excellent but are being rated way lower. I would like to hope that this is not a reflection of bad intentions but you never know.

Edit 2: seeing scores now after some time has passed. Overall I think the goal of something like this is to get honest clear feedback on your work. The trouble with incentives (like top scored image gets a reward) is that it changes the dynamic and authenticity of the feedback. Since a score is really meaningless without explanation it’s hard to gauge the value of that critique. I would say a good way for the fstoppers team to award a tutorial would be to do the reverse of what you do now. Take the full list of submissions and randomly pick a number for a random draw. Then for the images you critique in the video I would base it off of the scores you give in the video. If you have a tie then a debate on camera on why one is better than the other would be interesting to see. Just food for though.

I am shocked by seeing some of the masterpieces rated as 'Snapshots'.

Agreed. There are images being rated as snapshots that have clearly had work put into them.

Probably some people rating everyone elses photos lower than they should in hopes that it will make thiers the highest rated so they can win a prize

It's very clear there are people just voting 1's on everything. It's kind of an issue with public/open voting systems like this. I personally think the average of the photos here are 2-3. But theres certainly some photos way lower than they should be.

Just look at the ratings in the architecture critique. To me some of those looked "world class" and weren't over a 3, lol.

One of my photos with more than 60 votes and an average of about 4.2 in the community, here has an average of 3.2. It must have worsened in the meantime :D

3.2... I think you are leading the contest right now :D

I think it's okay to assume that the voting in something like this might be a tad more critical. As we are technically submitting these photos to be critiqued, where as on our profiles we are simply just posting to share.

That said, it shouldn't be THAT different. I tend to vote the same way either way.

It's the same for me. But I don't get discouraged by any means. ;) I still got solid 3 here :P. And as some mentioned above - seems like people are giving ones left and right, but most of the pictures in the contest are around 2-3 realm. And the ratings I give are usually in this range, with occasional 4 and very rare (but still) 5 or 1 star rating. Hope to see your works on the critique episode. Good luck! :)

Thanks Andrej..I agree with you :) anyway, it's just a game

I totally agree

I think there are people who are rating everything as 1 to drive the score down on their perceived competition. I've seen night shots that were obviously thought out and taken on a tripod with a rating of less than 2.

It's all the same for me, in good fun. I think it is a bit conflicting indeed and see the problem with the rating system for the contest. I see the problem with the rating system that - while good intentioned - it has a mix of objective/subjective opinion and it is difficult to determine how each side is being weighed. Technically good photographs that take a lot of skill to put together.. should these be considered "solid work" vs "excellent work" but then, what about the "snapshot" image in term of technicals.. yet of which tells a story which could be considered "masterpiece"

Yup. I get tonnes of ones. If only, the same people who rated 1, could explain by commenting on the shots taken to why they think its a 1, that would be very helpful.

people rate things worse in hopes their images stand out more. It's pretty stupid.

I think it would be nice having a possibility to label photos which are clearly no landscapes, instead of giving them a lower rating.

Mixed messages from the fstoppers crew is part of the issue. This one is titled landscape photography but was called landscape/cityscape a couple of times in the last critique where it was being introduced

Lee Morris
I agree with the harsh voting conversation. I can take criticism as much as anyone, but calling things a snapshot after so much care is taken with composition and editing is pretty dispiriting. I'd heard that F-Stoppers was pretty brutal and it's a shame because ultimately you want to foster good communities for sites to work out long-term. I'm not a delicate snowflake, but you have to question how useful this site is sometimes.

Hey buddy, if you are confident in the images you are posting, know that anyone voting "1" is likely just trolling. That's what I do, and maybe it's arrogant of me. But I know after miles traveled, time spent, and effort editing that none of my stuff should be considered a "snapshot." So don't take it too personally and realize that anonymous voting can be a shit show.

^^THIS'

Lee Morris
The new rating system itself is fantastic idea.
The problem is that the best rated image gets a free tutorial.
That way, people just downvote everything, in order to get a free tutorial themselves. All my shots I submit here, get 2 or 3 stars.
My portfolio on fstoppers has an average of 4.1 and i have pictures rating at 4.25 with 99 votes.
The same image here ends up on 3 or 2.5.
So something is definitely off. Maybe giving a tutorial to the best rated image does not well for the community.

I've given people 4's in this competition. I think I should be harsher.

Is it really that way that tutorial goes to the best voted picture? AFAIK it goes to a randomly selected author from the photos that goes into Critique episode. Did something change?

EDIT: I've read the "fine print". I see what you mean. Thankfully, that's not the only tutorial they're offering. ;) But yes, I agree - this approach make some people misuse the voting feature with hope to get advantage by downvoting others.

I think it's expected that people might be a little more harsh here considering the idea is to critique, but not this much. It's clearly people just trolling.

I suppose that's the issue, isn't? Could it be assumed one persons "harsh critiques" could be misconstrued as "trolling"? I guess that's the issue with the anonymity of the internet-- Trolls happen.

I think the anon scoring should go, if you're going to rate something you can stand by it. Maybe that would do away with some of the trolling

I notice a trend here. I tried to submit 1 more entry for the critique. The 1st vote i received was a 4, guess what the follow up rating i receive? Its a 1. Its obvious that someone is trolling hard enough or purposely bumping everyone down.

Is there any way to make the voting not anonymous? I'm dubious about the value of a star rating anyway (I love reading or hearing words, even harshly critical ones, but a context-free number from a bunch of people with muddy incentives isn't super valuable), but maybe giving some insight into people's voting trends would give some useful context to the numbers? Like "oh this person hates black and white so the lousy rating they gave my picture makes sense in that context" or "this person gives every HDR picture 4 stars" or what have you.

I'd definitely like to see some incentives for people to give some detailed written critiques. Seeing as that is the point of this really and as you say the star rating has dubious value even if it was super accurate. As much as I'd love my photos to be critiqued by the fstoppers team there is a fairly low chance of my shots being selected and it would be great if I could get some tips from the community (which has many great photographers in it) even if my photos aren't selected for the video.

Can you guys limit the upload per person to just 1 please? I’d love to rate all images, but this is just too much.

Hey all,
We realize that some individuals are likely trolling and voting unfairly in an attempt to drive down ratings in their favor. We are going to work on a fix for future episodes and will likely ban people who are clearly not rating fairly.
This has been happening since we've launched the new contest system and although you may be getting a lower score here than when posting on your profile, the overall scores seem to still be averaging out so that the best photos are on top and the ones that need to most improvement are on bottom.

The take away is don't let your feelings get hurt if your photo isn't close to where you'd expect it to be!

I'm completely open to improvement and critique, but I know if anyone's voting my photos (or many photos I see here) as "1 - Snapshot." Then it's just trolling.

If you rate a 1 you should also provide a critique mandatory..that way the spirit of contest is preserved

i wish some images comes with a little bit of description on them.

Can I submit the same picture twice if I made a few changes or do I have to delete my previous one?

I'd like to see the rating system to be improved like this:

Only those who leave a critical comment and some advice are allowed to rate the image. This not only let us know who has rate the image and how they think, the photographer will also learn from the critiques and make improvement in the future.

For a rating system like this we need some artificial intelligence 😊

Who's going to evaluate what is critical comment? And will you really comment on 600+ submissions? It's hard enough to rate all of them as it is.

What i mean is just write down your thought, who else would just type anything else other than advice/thought etc on others work if they really take one's work seriously.

There are ways of identifying or preventing others from typing nonsense or spamming like the word limit and spam detection etc. And for those who want to troll, they type good things but rate poorly, isn't it easy to identify them and ban them? And this the admin's job ain't it?

Ofc this is just my though and take it as pinch of salt. If one does not want to go through the trouble to rate other's work then just don't rate them.

While i support your idea that there should be more involvement/feedback with an event like this, it would be pretty much impossible. I try to comment a lot and it's sad to see 90% of images without comment at all.
But assume it takes me 2 minutes to look at, think about and comment on a picture then it would take me about 20 hours/week to comment on all entries. And that's an optimistic assumption.

There is German camera forum where there have contests and it is an requirement to give a comment on each submission in order to qualify. Then again the contest is monthly, not weekly, and has about 20-40 entries and not 600.

You might be right, but i think a similar method or system that based on this idea should be implemented so everyone's work is treated fairly.

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Contest Submissions

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

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