Last night I posted this picture in a newsgroup and finally got some nice reviews about my pictures from other photographs.

The reason I'm doing this is not to get responses like:

• nice picture
• wow
• wonderful

I get these responses from friends and I highly appreciate them, but they don't help me. I want to here critique so that I learn to avoid mistakes in the future. As an example this was a review I got for a picture from June last year:

Hey, I went to your link and your images all need work starting from the basic. Composition is off, lack of defined subject matter, exposure, etc… You are not using your photography skills to focus the viewer. I get lost in your images because; I am not sure what you want me to be looking at. Learn some rules like Rule of 3, Leading lines, Sunny 16 etc… Then expand your knowledge by more professional standards by reading, viewing other professional images, workshops, mentorship, etc…

Which told me, your pcitures suck, stop wasting my time and learn the basic. The problem with this was, when I showed these pictures to friends at this time, they liked them and told me great pictures.

Lesson: friends tell you most of the time it looks good, but to hear it from another photograph you don't know is way more value able.

So since this review I read a lot of books, put my camera away for 3 month and gave up, came back to it and invested in some good glass and started reading more and more about the topic and browsing a lot of books at stores.

Now what can I say about books:

• they show you pictures and tell you how they where taken
• you read them once or twice
• you can get the same information in the internet for free
• they improve your technique, but only to a certain point
• they are really boring to read
• they mostly repeat them self over and over again, like books about exposure.
• they show how me how difficult photography was in the old days when you had no display to evaluate your picture after a shot and to correct to exposure
  

Now one year later I got these reviews for a potraet which was done with a simple flash shot against the fall and a reflector to fill in some shadows. Basically do it the strobist way. Means use small strobes, be portable and flexible, break the rules and just have fun. (you do need to learn the rules first, thats why I read alot about them)

My best review was:

Re: C&C on a potrait please NEW
Martin Caie - 12 hours ago

Looks awesome to me. Looks like the kind of shot that would be in a biography if this lady were famous. I was going to say it was obviously a longer focal length because you avoided distortion, and now I see it was indeed (90mm).

Re: C&C on a potrait please NEW
K huack - 8 hours ago
Excellent photo. Can't find anything to fault.

Re: C&C on a potrait please NEW
allreddv - 4 hours ago

I think it a really great photo and a great pose. I have a couple of suggestions but please take them with a grain of salt. Since you are trying to concentrate on skin I think she is a little over exposed and you have lost quite a bit of detail in her skin. Especially around the nose and in the hand. The same is true with her lips and around them. I see you shot with at 3.5 and ISO 400. Why such a large aperture? If you step down just a but and lowered the ISO this might have given more detail. You really caught the look for her I believe and it is a great portrait. Again just some thoughts from someone else trying to learn to do the same. Would you mind posting the original?

The complete discussion can be found here.

Maybe one day I will consider to use an umbrella, they are just so:

• I wanna be pro but don't make money
• now I went totally nuts
  
• take this thing out of my face

So I think I stick with little flash's and diffusers.

Update:

I got some more critic and needed to update the picture. These seems to be the current final version.