Your Photo, My Feedback
On this page I provide technical feedback to images that have been submitted to me. My intent is to help other photographers grow in their skills by sharing with them the knowledge that I have learned, most often from other photographers.
Use the Contact Me page to submit your images to me for feedback.
Indiana Barn
This image captures a neat piece of Americana, which is slowly fading from the landscape. To advertise their product, the Mail Pouch Tobacco Company created a program in 1891 in which they used barns as billboards. They would pay the farmer a small fee for the right to use the barn, and the company would then paint their ad on the barn. This program lasted un 1992, and in its heyday, there were about 20,000 barns with Mail Pouch ads spread across 22 states.
In this image, I like how the barn was photographed at an angle. This allows the two sides with ads to be seen, and the diagonal sides of the barn leads to a more dynamic feel. I also like how the barn is located in the upper right section of the image. This keeps the barn out of the center, and allows a larger expanse of grass into the image, to help create a sense of a farm scene.
Some of the other strengths of this image are:
- The sky is dynamic and contains a lot of interest.
- The image is sharp from foreground to background.
- The image is very simple and clean. There are only the trees, grass, barn, and sky. There are no other distracting elements in the image competing for attention.
The face of the barn, however, is too dark, as most of the wood details have been lost. I would recommend using an exposure mask to brighten the barn to enhance the details of the wood.
As a general rule, it is best to keep the subject isolated from mergers with the frame of the image or with objects in the background. This helps to draw attention to the subject. In this image, the peak of the roof just barely merges with the top of the trees in the background. This could have been prevented by shooting from a slightly higher viewpoint, allowing the peak of the roof to be fully in front of the trees, or from a slightly lower viewpoint, allowing the peak of the roof to jut into the sky.
In this image, I like how the barn was photographed at an angle. This allows the two sides with ads to be seen, and the diagonal sides of the barn leads to a more dynamic feel. I also like how the barn is located in the upper right section of the image. This keeps the barn out of the center, and allows a larger expanse of grass into the image, to help create a sense of a farm scene.
Some of the other strengths of this image are:
- The sky is dynamic and contains a lot of interest.
- The image is sharp from foreground to background.
- The image is very simple and clean. There are only the trees, grass, barn, and sky. There are no other distracting elements in the image competing for attention.
The face of the barn, however, is too dark, as most of the wood details have been lost. I would recommend using an exposure mask to brighten the barn to enhance the details of the wood.
As a general rule, it is best to keep the subject isolated from mergers with the frame of the image or with objects in the background. This helps to draw attention to the subject. In this image, the peak of the roof just barely merges with the top of the trees in the background. This could have been prevented by shooting from a slightly higher viewpoint, allowing the peak of the roof to be fully in front of the trees, or from a slightly lower viewpoint, allowing the peak of the roof to jut into the sky.