Critique the Community
Submit Your Best "Moody" Image
Critique the Community: Moody
Congratulations to the winners!
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.
Rules & Prizes
It's time for another Critique the Community and this time we are going with the theme "Moody." Submissions can be anything from moody landscapes to dramatic portraits to upset children from a recently family portrait session. Whatever qualifies as your best moody image, we want to see it.
Submit up to two of your best photographs that capture the essence of moody for a chance to win a free tutorial from the Fstoppers Store.
The deadline to submit your images is October 31st by noon eastern time. Good luck and we hope to see some amazing image from everyone in our photography community!
Thu, 10/31/2019 - 11:00
This contest has ended.
753 people have cast a total of 59,198 votes on 1,059 entries from 662 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.
145 Comments
You don't want to do that to yourself.
I'd rather see a break out of "Community" and "Staff" votes.
The community is a bunch of animals.
This legit made me chuckle.
Digging this theme and lot of the uploads thus far.
Welcome to photographers’ community, where ISIS sounds friendly.
For what it's worth, I gave yours a 4.
Haha! Thank you!
Someone literally rated my images a 1. I went from a 5 and 3 notifications of people liking my image which you get when is rated 4 or higher and the image says the average rating is a 3 out of 4 votes meaning someone gave me a 1 to bring the score all the way down I get art is subjective but I doubt an image that was picked as image of the day here is a 1 why are people so petty rating everyone else a 1 won't make your images stand out.
Really? ugh that's discouraging. Probably haters? lol you work is worth high ratings so...yea, haters lol.
Concerning your images, I rated them as 3/4 -- but when it comes to expressing your thoughts in a understandable way I actually have to give you a 2. ;-)
I don't care about the ratings anymore, I'm more frustrated at the lack of genuine posting to the actual theme.
'MOODY'
Come on, some of the entries are not even close.
Maybe they think “I was in a mood when I took the picture” 😂
I think that is the subjective part, but I agree that some are a stretch.
Totally agree. I think the kid clutching the railing has more "moody" then almost all the others; it's a kid clutching a post!
You see, these images make you moody :)
I wish there was an "off topic" option. On another site I participate in, if you get 5, a vote comes up "Off Topic? Yes / No" and 5 yes votes and it's pulled.
That's when I give it a 1. Not in theme should be a 1 in my opinion. Anything that is applicable to the theme is then rated above that.
Moody is gonna be super subjective. Can't wait to see what people submit. People are always gonna be savage on the rating system but oh wells!
Fuck it. I rated everything 5 stars. I didn't even look at them. Just set up a repetitive clicking motion with one finger on the arrow key and one on the mouse button. I think I got through 250 or so, but got bored. Sorry, but if you entered the contest early, you won't be getting a 5 from me.
This is just as bad as the people who rate 1s!
You're absolutely correct. Just as bad ... and just as neutral when they are added together.
I don't think calling out anyone on their ratings is really fair when the community as a whole has been asking you to update the system for an extended period of time. You seem to be missing Phillip's point.
What system would fix the ratings? We can see the highest rated image in the back end but users cannot so trying to figure out who is beating you so you can down vote them would take forever to figure out. I guess we could hide the community rating altogether until after the episode is released.
In the end, I feel like the top images still get rated the highest and those who give 1s are balanced by those who give 5s.
There have been two common threads through all of the extensive commentary - remove the anonymity and change the 1 rating to off topic. Sure there might be some initial termoil. However this is a site for professional discourse and allowing the community to self regulate is the only way to go. The professional level of this large community is what sets fStoppers appart from the pack. In the groups, inappropriate feedback is shot down by the community immediately. Here, poor behavior is protected by your decision to keep voting anonymous In a critique-based activity and your establishment of a scale that is missing a fundamental level.
Here are some basic suggestions:
1) Hold off voting until submissions are closed.
2) Use a ranking scale.
The current scale itself is an issue because the levels don't relate to each other in a hierarchal manner. They are categories not rankings. Rankings would be something more like:
1 - off topic
2 - bottom 30%
3 - middle 30%
4 - above average 30%
5 - top 10%
6 - winner
3) Put in a checkbox at the bottom of the rating description and make people acknowledge reading it prior to voting. Will this control unethical voting? No. However, a VAST majority of comments in these contest threads indicate that voters are subjectively applying criteria rather than using your scale.
Will any of this change voters' motivation? No. However, I don't believe the voting is motivated by underhanded tactics. I think better of us. I believe the issue is the system/framework you have put in place.
Why would you do this? That's not helpful to people who actually want critique.
Because why not? There are already dozens of people who give 1-star ratings to every image not their own. Do you think my 5-star ratings are going to change that? If anything, since I cannot rate my own photos, this hurts my chances. But I don’t care because the rating system is (obviously) so broken that none of this matters anyway.
Is it just me, or is there a lot of moodless portrait photography?
There are whole lot of people bitching in here but there are way more people that haven’t read what the ratings mean... not taking up for the flawed system one bit but take a minute to read what you should be rating people and what your rating should mean in the eyes of the community.
I think there should be a required check box in the rules that you have to check off every contest so at a minimum you need to open the explanation window. I agree that, while the scale needs updating, the application by voters is a bigger issue. People would need to make the effort to educate themselves and take responsibility though....
Rating is not accurate if it comes from people with learning or poor skills it just a personal taste. Your image goes viral on Instagram featured by reposting pages here u got a 2star. The best critics u can get is from top notch photographers but gotta pay for that like take workshops
You have better chance meeting top notch photographers here than on Instagram...
They should increase the file size from 15mb to 25mb. Majority of my images are between 25-20mb.
Please take this as constructive (not criticism) but if you're uploading 20MB files, or even 15MB files, you may want to do a little reading on resizing & downsampling for different mediums. There's almost no reason to have a file that big on a website. I regularly export my images to 1080p (1920x1080) and those files usually take up less than 2MB, coming from 40MB RAW files that can wind up as 200MB TIF files (assuming flattened) after retouching in Photoshop. A 4K JPG is usually somewhere between 4-8MB. Any resolution higher than 5K is almost entirely unnecessary right now; even 5K dimensions are only useful for certain situations. Plus your images will actually look better if you take the opportunity to apply sharpening during the resizing process (which makes a huge difference).
I might need to read up on resizing for web. I mainly have files for print but I never actually did anything for web.
Resize to 2048px longest side. That is perfect for Facebook and web use and gives the best picture quality. It`s perferct size for the fstoppers site too. It`s just a couple hundred kb in size.
I'm not complaining about the ratings,, but if you give my image a 1 star I would at least like some constructive criticism on how to make it better. I mean it's not the greatest portrait I've ever taken but it's certainly moody, and I do have studio lights on the subject so i'm not sure how that falls into a snapshot. js
I agree. I have no problem receiving a harsh rating, but if the whole idea of a 1 is that you literally put no effort into the photo, then why would an image of mine, which has obviously had post processing work of some sort done, receive any 1's. I feel like it should be rare to see anyone getting 1's on here. Going through a lot of the images for this critique I only came across a handful that genuinely appeared to have had no thought put into them
Some people give a 1 if it is off topic.
I take the stand that if it’s off topic i just don’t vote on it. I agree my shot needed work, i shot it five years ago on a old 40d but it just seemed to fit this theme so much because of his expression.
Probably discussed a lot before - but curious - what are people's approaches to rating very good images but which (you may feel) doesn't fit the theme very well?
I give images outside the theme a 1.
And those are only 1’s I give.
And that’s honestly a fair rating for that.
Perhaps next time you could add a half page disclaimer on rules, examples and guidelines. Better yet, I think it's best if you limit the contestants to Lee, Patrick, Pye, Joey and Mike in the future because others can't seem to grasp the concept.
Hey everyone. I posted into this contest looking for some critism on what ive done right and what ive done wrong. Can the people who vote atleast tell me what ive done. Or can anyone advise where to go to get this advice
If you're truly looking for criticism, your best bet is to be part of the community and post into the groups as opposed to relying on the contests.
Thankyou Robert, I will look into this
I actually rated it and what bothered me most is that the eyes are just black, else it's a cute picture
Thankyou Felix. Is this a problem at the picture ? or can it be solved in post ?
i am sure you can correct that in post but I am super bad in photoshop and this stuff...
(Scratches neck out of desperation) “y’all got any more of those 5’s?” Lol.
The submissions for this CC have been my favorite since I started participating.
Great work everyone. A lot of top shelf work.
submission made!