Took this at the old fishing boat wreck at Corpach, near Fort William, crouched low by the bow. I liked it at the time but it never quite worked, and it took a critique to show me why.
- I exposed for the sky and lost the boat. The shadow side of the hull is just a dark shape. The fix is simple: meter (or tap to expose) on the hull, not the sky, and accept a slightly brighter sky. Then zoom right in and check you can see the wood grain.
- The horizon runs downhill to the right. Not by much, but enough that your eye slides out of the frame. Grid on, or rotate in the edit and crop the corners off.
- The foreground pebbles are a bit soft. They take up the bottom third, so they carry a lot of the texture. Focusing about a third of the way up from the bottom would have helped.
The one thing it said I got right was the low angle: “The low, close viewpoint makes the hull feel tall and imposing, which suits the subject well.” So I’ll take that.
Disclosure: the critique came from Artluni, a tool I built for exactly this kind of feedback, with each note pinned to the part of the photo it means. If anyone wants to try it there’s a no-signup preview on the homepage and 3 free critiques with no card: https://artluni.com/?code=FOUNDING50&ref=lemmy-photography . If you end up liking it, FOUNDING50 gives half price for your first 6 months, then normal price, cancel any time. Happy to hear what you’d have done differently with this one, too.
I’m getting reports on this one complaining about the advertising and also the AI aspect of this. On the advertising thing, I really don’t think I’m one to talk. Folks, what is our consensus here?
Yeah quite clearly an ad. But it is at least photography-related and could be useful to some.
Personally I’m ok with AI being used this way, it’s not generating the pictures or anything, just providing advice. That said, it’s advice on a very subjective topic - I can see some value in it for helping beginners pick up basic mistakes, but it otherwise won’t know what the photographer was trying to capture with a picture, or what look they were going for. What if they were going for a silhouette look here for example?
On the AI though, and I could be wrong, but it kinda feels like it’s just a front end for a mainstream model, in which case there’s the ethical questions around what pictures it was trained on and where the critiques of those images came from.
As far as the ad goes, I get that the whole “I found this tool and it helped me” thing is to get people to identify with the post, but the messaging is confusing. Software that tells you how to take better photos, but its creator couldn’t tell they exposed for the sky? Either that didn’t happen, or you shouldn’t be offering advice. Or it’s an advertising tactic that you need to be really careful with :)
I can’t open the sidebar for some stupid reason atm but is there a stance on ads here in general?
There isn’t, which is why I wanted to get a feel for what the community wants. I inherited this board and have not changed anything on the sidebar yet.
Ah gotcha.
Personally I can see value to the community in raising awareness of certain tools or resources. But there is obviously a blurry line between recommendation and advertising which I think we need to stay away from defining too closely, and focus instead on net community benefit, which yourself/the community can determine case by case.
For this one, others may disagree but on the surface at least I reckon it’s probably ok, just the way it was approached set off the alarms in my ad-weary brain.
Two approaches more broadly, in order of preference:
Their username advertises the AI as well. Feels like that’s the entire point
Yeh not a fan feels like an ad. If it slides there will likely be more.
Was the disclosure there when the post went up? i saw the post yesterday and didn’t notice it like that, i noted a mention that an AI review occurred, but that was it.