Critique the Community
Scary
We want to see the images that still give you chills
Cover Image By
Rules & Prizes
Welcome to the October installment of the Critique the Community! This month's critique theme is going to be "Scary," and we want to see your best photographs that scared you in some way. Maybe the image was scary to take, maybe it is scary to look at, or maybe it is scary for you to look back on now.
This one doesn't have to be about horror movies or Halloween, although those images are more than welcome too. A scary photo could be a shot you took hanging out of a helicopter, a storm you probably should have run from, a wild animal that got a little too close, an abandoned building that made the hair on your neck stand up, or even an old client image that makes you cringe today. What matters is that the photo carries a feeling of fear, tension, or unease, and that you can tell us why.
This month's theme, "Scary," is intentionally broad and open to any genre, and anyone can enter, so don't feel limited by what you normally shoot. Feel free to enter your best landscape, portrait, wildlife, street, documentary, sports, wedding, or conceptual images. There are basically no rules on what the image can feature so long as it made you, or will make the viewer, feel scared or unsettled.
Rules
- Each photographer may submit up to three images.
- This month's contest features a pretty broad theme, therefore any type of photograph is acceptable. However, the image must be scary in some way: scary to take, scary to view, or scary to look back on.
- 10 Images will be chosen by Lee and Patrick for the video critique.
- Finally, every image submitted MUST HAVE some written commentary on how the image was created, what gear was used, and most importantly, why this image represents "scary" to you. Any photo with a single sentence description will not be included.
Prizes
The top 3 images will each win credit to the Fstoppers Store, which can be used on anything in the store:
- 1st Place - $600 Fstoppers Store credit
- 2nd Place - $400 Fstoppers Store credit
- 3rd Place - $200 Fstoppers Store credit
Our elaborate and exhaustive photography tutorials not only help photographers immediately start taking professional quality images, but most of our tutorials also share business and marketing techniques that can help make photography a full time income. With genres like Headshots, Landscapes, Architecture and Real Estate, Fashion, Macro, and Product Photography, there is something for every photographer no matter what genre you specialize in.
Good luck to everyone who enters and we look forward to seeing your best "Scary" photographs!
Cover image by Peter Knight.
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.
6 Comments
I love this month's theme!!!! I can't wait to see all the submissions.
Is Fstoppers going in the right direction? Am I imagining things, or has community engagement dropped off significantly the last year or so, while the quantity of articles posted greatly increased? My quick survey indicates that 22 articles have been posted in the last 2 days, 17 by Alex Cooke, of which only 6 articles generated at least 1 comment (15 total comments, 7 of which were on the "Ditch Adobe" article).
So if I respond with a comment, the whole article after a few days will be buried in page two or beyond. I may as well go into the closet and talk to myself. Virtually all reader comments appear in the link to the creator's YouTube channel. So if I'm interested in what anyone has to say about the video, I have to go to YouTube. Maybe that's fine for other people... I'm not particularly interested in following YouTubers though.
I disagree with the decision Fstoppers made for having deleted the spot in the home page stream where it used to show the number of comments posted to an article. I used to click on articles that had more comments (member participation), even if the subject wasn't of much interest to me. It's like choosing a restaurant... we tend to check out the ones with lots of cars in the parking lot, and ignore the ones with nothing but weeds, right? So I'm gonna click on every article to see what's being discussed, only to find the vast majority have the community appeal of a bad restaurant? Maybe Fstoppers is only interested in clicks or page views. That seems to be the strategy behind making money. That and selling tutorials. But I'm personally tired of the constant barrage of articles every day (many of which are for camera lenses or gear I'll never even consider buying), while articles that might generate some interesting conversation get buried downstream in a matter of a few days.
I suppose it's worth raising the point too that while authors who post articles here almost always respond vehemently to accusations of using AI, how can one person post 17 written articles in 2 days without the assistance of AI generated text? I suppose it really doesn't matter anyway whether a machine or a human writes the articles. Especially if nobody responds. So many of the people who used to be regular contributors in the comments sections are long gone. I miss the regular comments from Tom, Robert, Ivor and Eddie, and many others who have quit Fstoppers.
Even the contests aren't generating the same degree of conversation they used to, and when people stop complaining about the voting system, you know the place is dead. Entering a contest is a test of patience with people who only participate in the Fstoppers community long enough to vote everything a one or two star image. No explanation... just low scores. If that doesn't drive folks away from participating in the contests, I don't know what would. Yet Fstoppers never changes the system. I'm not trying to be a curmudgeon.... just trying to understand a reason to remain a member.
I think its a few things. First, engagement is down across all mediums, so a drop off is expected. I also think there's not a ton to write about these days, since honestly, innovation in the photography world has flattened. Even if the rumored Canon R4 is a global shutter, who cares since Sony already did it 2 years ago. Almost all modern cameras are great, so there's really not much more to write about. Then factor in that barely anyone reads anymore.
As for the contests, I think people just gave up on arguing about the voting, even though I know people go through and vote photos a 1 because they still think the ranking matters. The prizes for the last several have been tutorials, which is a far cry from the lenses, camera bags, gift cards, etc., so I think fewer people are entering. I bought one of the tutorials when there was a discount a few years ago and it was great, but I don't think that's enough to draw in a huge amount of people.
For me, I follow so many photography sites, I sometimes forget about Fstoppers. I also rarely comment, because with the internet these days it can easily turn into online arguing.
It certainly doesn't help that very few of the articles are original content; so much of it is just taking someone else's YouTube video and providing a description of it. Most articles are very clearly AI written too, so (if they know it or not) will put folk off as there's no style to become a fan of.
For a website that is about a creative outlet, it's very 'creatively bankrupt'
Yes! I agree 100%. Look at the content being posted. 99% of it is about things in the toy store and not about the creative process, which is much more interesting to me. It can, and does, take hours to write an article, especially about the art of photography and why it is that people create the images they do, and then the return is very small. When I came in as a writer it was with great enthusiasm, and I hoped to make contact with other photographers who actually do make images. What happened was very little actual interaction - disappointing, and then quite a bit of the commentary was done by phantom posters who had no work showing on the site, and no visible presence except for that one very nasty diatribe. So why bother? I got kicked off of Facebook because of some things that happened that were completely beyond my control, and I hoped that this would be a good replacement. I really would like there to be actual forums where interactions would be encouraged. As to original content? Yes, I get that. AI truly does suck.
Even worse than the drop in engagement in articles is the intromision of many spam bots that publish advertisement photos. The site should improve bot filters and remove publications quickly. Otherwise, photos by real photographers get lost among them.