Thanks for your votes everyone. It was my first challenge and I just wanted to get in the game.
I took this picture at my sister's house on the last day of the challenge and saw all of the DOF flaws, but thought, what the heck, let's just get in the game.
I actually like the legs in the background. It's my sister at the fridge finishing the preparation of an amazing summer seafood feast (we are in Australia). I wanted it to look like a modern cookbook picture with lots of white and great DOF.
With a small screen on the D70 and 1.4 as the aperture, I didn't really see that it was so shallow till I got home. I should have focused on the front oysters and stopped down to even f8 or 11. I don't mind the composition and the colour was nice and the activity at the fridge was a bonus not a distraction, for me anyway.
But, I thought, let's see how this whole competition thing works, and so I dove in.
I aim to do better next time.
Statistics
Place: 72 out of 110 Avg (all users): 5.2050 Avg (commenters): 5.0513 Avg (participants): 4.7833 Avg (non-participants): 5.3015 Views since voting: 2012 Views during voting: 477 Votes: 322 Comments: 41 Favorites: 0
Well done - especially for your first entry! (My first one - or several for that matter - really bombed! LOL) I really liked this shot and scored it a 7. I would have scored it higher, but the DOF seemed a little odd to me. It's almost as if there was too much blur at the forefront of the image and that the DOF was just a hair too shallow. That being said, it's still a good shot and a solid score. Good job and welcome to the fray! :-)
This had the potential to be a really lovely image, but the dof is a bit distracting to have such a long plate and only the middle in focus. Might have been nicecr to have the front third in focus and then, in order to see more of the plate, either tilt it up in the back or swivel the angle a bit so it is not a true vertical shot. The colors and tones are nice and warm and the exposure is perfect.
A good idea. Lighting is fine and the use of shallow DOF adds interest to the composition. Unfortunately the dish appears crooked and will be a distaction for viewers.
I honestly had a bit of a difficult time telling those were oysters...it was actually more of an educated guess really...perhaps a deeper field of focus would have been more effective in this case? More than anything the lemon wedges grab my attention...not the oysters.
For me the POV is wrong. Or at least the focus should have been on the foreground. IMO. Can't really see the meat of the pic (the actual oysters). I think you were on the right track- could have been very good.
Depth of field is just a little too narrow - focuses attention on the lemon more than the oysters. I wouldn't suggest wide enough to have the whole plate in focus, but a bit wider than you have would be good (around half to one f-stop).
Interesting angle to the shot. Needs to have a sharper focus. Also, perhaps would have been better to crop the top right down to the far end of the to remove the distracting black lines in the background.
I don't really like the angle this was taken from. I'd like to see more of the food. Right now the DOF is too shallow and the angle too low for me to see what it is. The colour looks good.
This is really close to being nice shot (IMO)... But your DOF is so shallow and as a result what is most clear in the shot are the lemon wedges, not the oysters. It took me a second to figure out what the "aphrodisiacs" were, because they were out of focus. Best!
The image does not really tell me what the dish is. Can't really make it out without the clue from your title.
Perhaps a more diagonal presentation of the dish would have worked better.
Guessing there oysters? Could really use one of the suckers more where your focal range is, i.e. swap it with a lemon. Other than that I can very well see this in a cook book :0)
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