Critique the Community
Portraits
Show Us Your Best Portrait, Win A Full Lighting Kit
Congratulations to the winners!
Congratulations to our three winners above!
First place Wescott Lighting Kit: Teemu Andreas
Second place DxO Software Bundle: Chip Weiner
Third place Fstoppers Tutorial: Janos Lakatos
To claim your prize, please message Lee Morris through the Fstoppers Community.
Be sure to check out this month's contest featuring "unique lighting" for a chance to win a bunch of Profoto's new light modifiers!
Rules & Prizes
Welcome to another Critique the Community contest! Each month, Fstoppers is challenging our community to submit their best photographs for our Critique the Community show, and three lucky winners will win a variety of photography related prizes.
For the month of April, we want to see your best Portrait photographs. Since this is a fairly broad category, feel free to submit any photograph that showcases a person in some interesting way. Each image featured in the critique will be picked based on creativity, lighting, subject matter, overall production, final edit, and overall "wow" factor. The community rating does play a small part in our selection but it's not as big as you might think so don't get too wrapped up in what others have to say about your image.
Deadline
This month we are allowing up to 4 photos to be submitted. All images must be posted to this page no later than April 29th, at 8:00pm Eastern time.
As always, every eligible entry must have at least 3 sentences explaining how the photo was taken, any valuable technical information including lighting, camera gear, lens choice, etc, and any background story that might help our viewers understand why your image is so interesting.
The Prizes
Each month we are giving away a variety of different photography related prizes. Below are the specific prizes for the month of April.
First Place - One grand prize winner will receive a free wireless 2-Light Portable Flash kit by Westcott. Included in this kit is a JR400 400 Ws strobe, a second JR200 200 Ws strobe, a wireless FJ-x3 trigger, and a variety of accessories such as Gel set, Magnetic Grid and 55 degree Reflector. This battery operated kit is great for on-location portraits as well as shooting in the studio and can be synced up to nearly any camera with the universal FJ-x3 wireless flash trigger. Valued at $1199.90
Second Place - Our second place winner will receive a suite of post production software from DxO. Included in this software bundle are copies of PhotoLab 7, FilmPack 7, and ViewPoint 4. With PhotoLab 7, you can edit and color grade all your raw files quickly, easily, and professionally. Once you edit your raw files, you can then use FilmPack 7 to give your photos a classic film look based on your favorite color or black and white film stock. Finally, you can fix all sorts of lens and perspective distortion in ViewPoint 4 to make your photos look as perfect as possible. Valued at $467
Third Place - One third place winner will receive a free tutorial from the Fstoppers Store. We have full length tutorials on a wide range of genres such as architectural photography, headshots, landscapes, product photography, and of course portrait photography. Valued at $299
Added Bonus!
And finally, to help celebrate the month of April and get everyone excited about portrait photography, Fstoppers has made a massive sale on our portrait tutorial with Clay Cook. It's normally priced at $300 but for the entire month you can get it for just $49.
Clay Cook is an incredible editorial and advertising photographer based out of Louisville, Kentucky. His tutorial on portraiture is incredibly thorough and covers everything from wardrobe styling to simple set building to both simple and advanced lighting setups. So regardless if you are an outdoor natural light shooter, or you want to step up your studio productions, Clay's tutorial is going to have something for you.
Good luck to everyone entering and we look forward to critiquing your best images in the "portrait" genre!
Featured Image by Devon Krige
Mon, 04/29/2024 - 20:00
This contest has ended.
250 people have cast a total of 25,565 votes on 615 entries from 240 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.
70 Comments
Perfect contest!
This community always amazes me with how absurdly critical it is. I just went through all the submissions so far, and the highest-rated one is 2.75. Most are close to 1. Does anyone honestly think these are all careless snapshots as their ratings imply? None are perfect, but with a few exceptions, every photo here is at "least" a 3 if you go by the definitions linked in the article.
I would strongly disagree. Most of the pictures here so far are only a 2 and many are just lazy (bad) snapshots. My problem with a lot of the reviews is that so few people here actually have good taste. I realize that one can argue excellently about taste. But a good picture is still a good picture, even if it doesn't suit my taste. Here you will mostly find photos that stuck in the past like 15 years ago. Especially when it comes to portraits, the majority tend to view poor retouching, outdated concepts, old-fashioned lighting and cheap poses positively. Not to mention the image of women and what is perceived as “sexy”. I know it sounds arrogant and a lot of people will hate me for it. I dont care. There is a good reason why pictures in magazines and advertising look different.
A ton of images got added since I commented, but I'd still point out that to be voted a 1 an image needs to be a "snapshot" that could be taken by anyone in that moment. The mere fact that an image has posing, lighting, thought going into composition, etc, by definition means it's not a 1, yet enough people are voting 1 that most of the images are scoring less than 1.5. I'd also add that I've noticed in previous critiques there are often world class images that get voted around a 2.
For example, looking at your profile, you have a lot of great work that I'd argue is of quite high quality, but I bet you couldn't score over 3 with any image even though, by the definitions of the ratings, every image in your portfolio is a 3-4 at the very least.