Critique the Community
Your Best Portraits
Enter and Win $1200 in Aftershoot Prizes
Congratulations to the winners!
We just wrapped up our Critique the Community contest for the month of April, and with over 800 submissions, we had some amazing photos to choose from. I want to thank everyone who entered and give a big congratulations to our winners below.
Head over to the next Critique the Community Contest running now until May 30th and enter your best "modern" photograph from any genre of photography.
March Prizes
1st Place - David Hunter
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 Place - Braden Nesin
3rd Place - Joshua Chan
This month, both 2nd and 3rd place winners will receive their choice of any Fstoppers photo or video tutorial found at Fstoppers.com/store
Rules & Prizes
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
Wed, 04/30/2025 - 23:45
This contest has ended.
313 people have cast a total of 22,810 votes on 859 entries from 414 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.
127 Comments
Those aren't my terms, that is what's written here about them from (quote) the site, Just the facts, nothing to do with splitting hairs.. I didn't say you shouldn't celebrate getting them.
Your right... the explanation of 1-star is really in depth. I hadn't read it since I started here https://fstoppers.com/rating It is saying that if thought is put into it at all, you should not rate 1-star. hmm.
I can understand what you're saying. There have been a couple of images in past contests where I was ready to put a 1 and realized I was only doing so because the image turned my stomach. I had to put that feeling aside and judge it based on its photographic merit, not the subject matter. Finding I could not be unbiased, I simply did not vote on it.
Subject always affects average 'rating' whether that's fair or not. Thems the breaks. Not something to whine about.
Um, I'm not whining about it?
Hey, not just you specifically but the concept of 'why is my image being rated so poorly is a continual theme here?' is it because people don't like my subject as much as they like the subject in someone else's image. Surely the ones chosen in the 'winners' group, may actually be chosen, because they have some interesting 'subject matter'.
The fact that you replied directly to me indicated it was directed at me. No worries.
I'm guessing that the large majority of Fstoppers members who breeze through rating these competition photos don't think much about the concept of a portfolio. How many people even have one, either on a website or in paper form? Probably not many. Photographers who do have one will throw their best images to date into a portfolio, regardless of the criteria applied by some universal set of standards for what qualifies as an "expert" or "professional" level image. And a professional can be anyone who takes money for work... it says nothing about the quality of one's work. I only raise this point because "portfolio worthy" is vague and subjective to begin with. Certainly my portfolio is very different today compared to 20 years ago. It wasn't as good then, but it was still a portfolio.
I agree with you partly. Many youngins here prob don't know what a portfolio is. Doesnt mean their work isnt good though. What I get out of what the contest rating means on this site is, The portfolio is your computer, so a 2 is you should delete it. Unlike you, I still have many of my old images from 40 years ago in my portfolio, mixed with new. Back then, a portfolio meant something, so I didn't make one until I was happy with my own work. This for sure didnt happen for a while back then. I do shake my head here knowing that others will give low ratings if they just dont like that type of image. Thats fine because I wont be playing in the contests here after reading about how they work.
Really hard to vote because I keep getting an "Unable to complete the request. The error has been logged" error message.
I've been getting them in Groups as well.
I've been getting errors site wide mostly while login
You know Puerto Rico had an island wide black out a few days ago. But I think these error are far more sinister. Like now I am not able to post an image here with my reply.
Is it me or are people purposely trying to rate people's photos at lower stars. I see a lot of photos on Fstoppers contests where the average stars should be 1-2 stars higher on photos.
Just read the entire thread above you lol. Last year's portrait top rating was like a 3.3.
They use a weird rating system. According to them 1 isn't bad. If you read their rating details I'd agree most sre a 1 or 2. Very few should be 4 or 5.... A good 3 here and there ..
I think there are also a lot of envious people. :)) You better write you took the photo on a potato camera. I you took it with a 6k Body, they will hate on you. In my case, I see a lot of average photos with 3, but also good ones with 3. I expected to have at least 4 stars on my photo.
I also don't know who will have the patience to look on all the photos and rate them and what happens if you join the contest in the last days.
for unknown reasons, some files generated an error message "failed to move file" when trying to upload from computer. are there size or file type limits?
Size limit is 20MB, there are restrictions on file type .JPG is allowed while .JPEG is not. I don't remember regarding BMP, .PNG, et cetera.
I was having this as well with an 11mb JPG, had to load a 1.6mb version instead.
I had issues uploading yesterday but seems to be resolved today for profile uploads anyway
Last day! Wow, this was fun to watch. So many amazing photos. I don't know how they're going to narrow it down.