Critique the Community

Submit Your Best "Moody" Image

Critique the Community: Moody
  • Submission Deadline: Thu, 31 Oct 19 15:00:00 +0000

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  • Voting is closed.

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Lee and Patrick have given feedback to 20 of the community's "moody" images. Do agree with their and the rest of the community's ratings? 

Congratulations to our two winners. Martijn Hermans submitted the highest rated image and Daniel Cordero was chosen as the random winner. I will be in touch with both of you via your Fstoppers profiles to claim your prize.

If you'd like to participate in the next episode, we invite you to submit your long exposure photographs to be critiqued. 

  • Submission Deadline: Thu, 31 Oct 19 15:00:00 +0000

    This contest has ended.

  • 788 people have cast a total of 64,978 votes on 1,072 submissions from 670 contestants.
  • Congratulations to the winners!

    View Results

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22 Comments

i still do not understand how selection is done, ratings are just important for one picture...

Agree, half of the photos selected are not moody at all.

Personally, I find it interesting to see where my photos fall relative to other folk's submissions.

I hand picked all these myself and just picked ones that stood out to me. Moody is def a subjective category and I might have left one slip by just so we could make a joke about it not being moody.

Why not select the top 15 rated community images, and your personal top 5 favorite images or something? If you just and pick all of them, it's what you're drawn to or stand out to you.

I don't want Lee, David, or I to ever just pick the top 15 images mainly because we want some variety in skill and community rating. By picking images that are well below the top 15, we also equalize all the crazy voting people are doing here. I thought the random photo winner was pretty cool and it was only a 2.4 rating. I actually liked that image a lot more than hundreds of photos above it and I"m glad we included it.

I am glad to see you posting more in these threads. It is really helpful to hear your thoughts.

Perhaps at the beginning of a new contest you could pose a question to get a focused idea of your stakeholders' thoughts. You could even pose it as a pole rather than opened ended and just ask "would you prefer option 1, 2 or 3?" Get a quick touch base for a tweak.

Personally, I would prefer that the two critique providers ( you, Lee, David, mom, ...) Each picked your top 10 and explained why. Give us something to shoot for - both in skill acquisition and actually 'winning' by nature of being selected due to quality instead of "a joke about not following the topic."

Your rationale here contradicts what you posted in the main contest comment thread too. There you said that the voting seems to identify the top images in the end. Here you state that you are selecting images to equalize crazy voting. It would be worth considering either going with the actual votes and calling this process a contest or picking the images based on your preference and calling this opportunity "critique the community" and drop the contest bit. The "winners" in the current format are not the vote winners but rather win by means of subjective selection. Voting in this scenario would be more about critique since it would not be about selecting a "winner" and this might neutralize the voting issues.

My comments are not to be complaints. I am invested in this site, as are many, and this is a good thing. You and Lee have created something great here. One way to keep it growing is to periodically pause, evaluate and tweak - critique the process - based on the end-user feedback. It's a win-win.

Thanks for providing the opportunity to share these thoughts.

I think you are failing to understand what Critique the Community is actually about. We aren't aiming to pick the top 20 images. We never have and never will pick only the top images the Community has rated. The community rating is there to add perspective to what the two critiquers on the video say. It seems like you think the community is voting to determine which images make the video but that's never been what the scores are about.

Imagine if we had 20 world class images submitted. What good would that do to show only 5 star images? I'd love it because I want to showcase the best images but from a learning perspective, I think it's best to have images from 1-5 represented (although 1s are usually so bad it's hard to critique what would make them better).

Perhaps the issue lies in the Critique the Community posts falling under the "contest" header. It's truly not a contest in the normal sense of the term but we put it there because it's easy to find. My goal is to have many more contests that have truly random winners, but the CTC only has free tutorials just because Lee and I thought it would be nice to give something away as we film. In no way are the votes and ratings supposed to qualify someone for entering in the contest. Again, they are their to see if our own critiques are way off base or closer to what a larger group of people think as well.

Great response! Thank you for taking the time. I agree that the "contest" and "winners" might create a different perception. I understand your goal and I think you are achieving it. Cheers!

Thank you for your response, it's clear now, "Contest" is not the good word and it's probably better that you and Lee choose the finalists. I hope being chosen one day :-)

Yes, now I understand better that it’s kind of meaningless for me to spend so much time voting. As you can tell from my username, I’m just here to vote.

I still vote on the ones that really stand out to me, if only to indicate to the photographer I appreciated their art.

Hi Patrick, of course moody is quite subjective but for example the surfing one is not definitely moody. There is a lack of mystery and melancholy in some of them, and this is what makes a photo moody or not.

See I read the surfing one as moody in the sense of impactful or bold and intense. It's not moody in the sense of soft dark lighting but it is moody in another way. Plus I really liked that photo and we don't see enough stuff like that in the community sometimes. I didn't want all the moody photos to just be dramatic landscape photos and Dan Winters style portraits.

Appreciate your response! Impactful or bold are not moody Patrick. That could be for another contest called Action, Sports, momentum...but mood is about drama, atmosphere and low light. You won't say that a sunny sky is moody, so someone surfing during a sunny day doesn't make the photo moody. I guess it's a different point of view or understanding of the meaning of mood.

I think the issue is "moody" is just too subjective of a term to actually mean anything. It's why I gave Pye crap when he suggested it.

I've been looking up definitions on the word moody and while some do use words like "gloomy and depression" to describe it, others use "temperamental" and "expressive of a mood". If it's to be read as "representative of a mood" and a mood can be anything, well all photos can be moody. The surfer photo def doesn't have dark and dramatic lighting but the fact that it's contrasty and the surfer is failing to land the trick or ride the wave, could most definitely be categorized as a "mood". Moods can be cheerful, gloomy, melancholy, whimsical, romantic, ominous, hopeful, angry, fearful, tense, and lonely. I'd classify all the photos in this critique to have one of those mood qualities.

I know it's not the answer that you want but it was the main reason I felt Pye's category for "Moody" would be very subjective.

My taser photoshoot images are a great example of what I'm trying to say. They were shot bright and almost airy yet they are the epitome of what temperamental is in a photograph. They are literally changing moods in the moment the photo was captured. Some look like they are in pain while others look like they are in pleasure. Would they be "moody" images? I'd say so.

I was thinking...have you guys ever thought about requiring a certain ranking on the personal portfolio to be able to vote on the contests? As you do limiting the number of posts you can upload until you receive more than 3.5stars with 5 voters, I think it would be great to avoid the huge amount of trolls you have around here.

donc les votes sont totalement inutiles finalement puisque le choix final revient à Patrick et à Lee de manière subjective, je ne conteste pas les choix mais la façon dont les concours sont présentés, si nous passons 1h à voter et commenter pour que cela ne serve à rien au final n'est pas très agréable.

Thanks for the critique Patrick, appreciate the feedback 👍

Send Patrick back to Charleston the sun must be going to his head down there.

I don't understand how moody is volcano picture

In Patrick/Lee's defense - that was the only picture that they didn't pick; the community did.

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.