Contests and Critique Category Archive

Learning to Self-Critique Your Images

I’d like you to join me on a journey of learning to see and take better pictures. That is, learning to view our images critically before any one else sees them. Early in my journey, I was intrigued by a signature from a photography forum: “Please harshly critique my photos!...

How Was This Picture Made #12: The Answer

Last week, for our How Was This Picture Made? series, I had posted a landscape photograph to share and discuss. Thanks to our PL commentators, Gary Bunton, Brian Webster, and Shane, for their participation and sage commentary on the techniques employed and the overall considerations. Well done! (more…)

How Was This Picture Made #12?

In advance of my upcoming article on the directionality and quality of light, composition, and mood, I decided to post a landscape photograph to invite our readers to share their thoughts on how this photo was visualized and constructed. I made this particular photograph at one of my favorite subjects...

How Was This Picture Made #11: The Answer

It has been a while since I posted the "How was this picture made #11?" article, where I showcased a very high-resolution image of sand particles with tons of detail. The image was massive in size and resolution when I extracted it out of Lightroom. In fact, the image was...

How Was This Picture Made #10: The Answer

We had a lot of good guesses on our tenth “How Was This Picture Made” article, including a couple that were almost entirely spot-on. Congratulations to Photography Life reader Goh Wei Jun for his guess — he will receive a copy of our upcoming eBook, Creative Landscape Photography, as a prize....

How Was This Picture Made #11?

It is great to finally be back to posting regularly on the site! It took us a while to finally wrap up our second video course, and despite my attempts to keep the site fresh with new content, things have been quite hectic, to say the least. And now that...

How Was This Picture Made #10?

This is the tenth post in our "How Was This Picture Taken" series, and this one features a photograph I took at Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado. Since this is the tenth installment in our series, and because we have a number of exciting projects coming up, we’d like...

How Was This Picture Made #09: The Answer

We had quite a few of our readers engage in our last "How Was This Picture Made #9" article for the image of the Sokullu Mehmet Pasa Mosque that I posted from my trip to Istanbul, Turkey. While some of the readers did a great job at giving a description...

How Was This Picture Made #09?

We are continuing our "how was this picture taken?" series of articles and this time I present an image of the Sokullu Mehmet Pasha mosque, which I captured at sunrise from a rooftop of a hotel in Istanbul: The answer has been posted here. (more…)