Welcome to the April 2025 Critique the Community Contest! For this month's contest we want to make it super simple and inclusive by asking for your best portrait images. They can be full length, headshots, single person, multiple people, natural light or lit in the studio. Anything is fair game for this critique!
As always, please write a short story on how you took the portrait, what camera gear and lighting you used, any challenges you faced, and any other interesting information about the shoot in general.
Rules
- This contest is 100% free to join
- Each photographer may submit up to 3 images
- Each photograph must include a description that includes details about how the photograph was taken, what post processing was done to it, where it was taken, and what challenges you faced taking the image. Simply writing a single sentence that doesn't explain much of anything will disqualify you from being chosen!
March Prizes
1st Place
This contest is sponsored by the culling, editing, and retouching software company Aftershoot. Aftershoot is a powerful all-in-one AI based editing suite aimed at helping photographers shave off hours and even days on their photography sessions. Unlike other editing software suites, Aftershoot does it all by helping photographers quickly cull down their full photo sessions in minutes, batch complex edits throughout different mini sessions, and offers quick skin and face retouching with just a few clicks.
Fstoppers readers can get a free 30 day trial of this software, but one lucky first place winner will receive a full Annual Aftershoot Max Plan worth $720.
On top of that, Aftershoot is including a $500 Amazon gift card to help you produce better portraits on your next photoshoot! Total prize value ($1220).
2nd and 3rd Place
This month, both 2nd and 3rd place winners will receive their choice of any Fstoppers photo or video tutorial found at Fstoppers.com/store
The total value of this prize is up to $299
We are excited to see your best portrait photographs. Good luck to everyone and we will see you at the end of the month!
Bonus April Sale
For the month of April, we are offering up Clay Cook's Fashion and Editorial Portrait Photography tutorial for just $59. Clay Cook is an incredible photographer based out of Louisville, Kentucky who specializes in eye catching portraits used for marketing, advertising, and story telling. In this 11+ hour tutorial, Clay teaches some of his favorite lighting setups, shows you how to completely change your images by building and designing inexpensive sets, and explores how to set a mood with wardrobe, interesting color grades, and outdoor location choices.
This tutorial was design for photographers in both large and small niche markets looking to build a significant business around editorial and fashion portraiture. Normally this tutorial is sold for $300 but we are marking it down to $59 just for the month of April.
Featured Image by the talented Marc Olivier Le Blanc
