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 22,872 votes on 861 entries from 415 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
I really wish you would put Critique the Community in the thumbnail or title. I almost skipped this video in my youtube feed because I thought it was going to be a rant about aliens and I kept wondering when the contest critique was going to be posted.
what are the rules concerning ownership of the images uploaded? and what maybe done with them after.
They are all in our TOS. Basically we don't do anything with the images but by submitting them to this and our site you agree to let us use them for certain applications. The main one we do is make featured images like the one on this contest and in our videos sometimes we show a montage of the community and your image could be in a short clip. We just want to cover ourselves from being sued. We aren't licensing them out or using them in any other way expect to promote the contest, promote Fstoppers/community or give commentary which is already allowed under commentary laws.
i appreciated the continuous alien humor.