Critique the Community
Submit Your Best "Action" Photo
Critique of Action Themed Photos
Congratulations to the winners!
Congratulations to the lucky 20 images chosen for this Critique the Community, and congrats to the top rated image by Alexis Cuarezma. This week's random winning submission goes to Chris Manning. Please contact Lee Morris to claim your free tutorial from the Fstoppers Store.
If you want to submit to our next Critique the Community, you can post your best "quirky" photos here: https://fstoppers.com/critique-community/submit-your-best-quirky-image Make sure your enter your photos by January 29th at 11:15pm Eastern Time for your chance to make the next episode!
Rules & Prizes
We want to see your best images that capture "Action"our next Critique the Community.
Between now and January 24th, you may submit up to two of your best images of "Action". We will be selecting a total of 20 images to give feedback to and two entrants will win a free Fstoppers original tutorial. The first winner will be decided by the highest average community rated image and the second will be chosen at random. Please note that we want to see high quality pictures and will probably overlook anything that looks like a snapshot.
Once you've uploaded your submissions, we encourage you to scroll through everyone else's and give them ratings and comments of your own. Please keep feedback encouraging and helpful.
Fri, 01/24/2020 - 22:00
This contest has ended.
504 people have cast a total of 37,845 votes on 587 entries from 380 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.
37 Comments
My photos aside. There are some amazing extreme sport photos in here that are being rated so low. Seriously brushing the edge of world class extreme sports photos. If you're a portrait photographer coming here and rating these epic photos with a 1 star go kick yourselves and do a little research. What you think is a terrible photo is exactly what we get paid for. Like I said not necessarily talking about my photos. There are definitely better than mine with very low ratings.
yea it seems they want everyone to be natgeo shots; i have lots of photos that do good locally but on here it seems everyones photos sucks; im about done with this site and well not hard to post it all over social media
Completely agree, it's amazing the photos that people have taken. Very motivating to improve my own work. I am just rating everything higher than I normally would to help offset the "1 star" people.
I have to agree with you. I just looked over the results, and it is quite confusing. It looks like out of 620 images entered, on a scale from 1 to 5, only 49 of them were rated 3.0 or higher. Two photos tie for the top rating with a measly 3.6.
A 3 means "solid", while 4 means "excellent". So this community, collectively, did not think that any of the 620 images were excellent.
Less than 3 means either "needs work" or "snapshot". Sadly, it seems that the Fstoppers comminuty, collectively, does not place as high a value on action images as they do on set-up model and landscape imagery.
People routinely post photos here to Fstoppers that are obviously photoshopped - they don't even look like real life scenes, resembling a mixture of photography and digital art - and those images regularly receive ratings in the 4 to 5 range.
It does seem that there is a weird, awkward bias here that seems to favor fantastically photoshopped photos of people and of landscapes.
If you have a shot of a human model or of a landscape, and you tinker with it enough in Photoshop so that it doesn't look just like real life anymore, then you can get a high rating. Problem is, those kind of photos are appalling to my eyes, and to my common sense.
I had thought I would enjoy being a part of this community, but it seems that the genres I like the most are the ones that aren't real popular here, while the genres I don't have any interest in at all are the ones that people here value the most. Whatever.
Me too. I give so many 5's, just help push good photos from 1's to 2's. Obviously lightings, composition, contrast, color, etc., are all important, but I think the most important element in an ACTION shot is the 'decisive moment', which I feel gets completely ignored here. Most of these images are editorial in nature, not commercial, but everyone votes with commercial in mind.
Also, portfolio ready photos don't need to be perfect. I think when people see ONE flaw or ONE thing they would change, they immediately think, "this photo NEEDS WORK".
The rating system is a bit weird too. It says "In some cases the jump from 4 to 5 stars may be as simple as changing the unknown model in the picture with a celebrity or bringing in a set designer or stylist to make the image slightly better."
It seems to imply that what makes a good photo is set-design, celebrity models and heavy post-production.
I'm sitting here looking at a book of world-class images by the Magnum photographers. Pretty much every one of them would be marked down under that system. I can't imagine how Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and Martin Parr would fare here.