Image Critique

i think it's a bit too stark. selective color used right can be interesting. however it often comes out looking out of place. like this one, there isn't much point to take the color out of everything. but this also has a weird glow on the post, and the background has a weird blur, i think its real, but its distracting with that white thing.

if there was a row of boxes and you chose to color those it might work. as a stand alone, i don't see the point. as a thumb i see a floating blue box. if anything the post should be colored also, maybe red.

---Mike Savad

I like the selective color for this. I think the composition could be improved by cropping of some from the left and the bright area at the top. I know you would lose a bit of the support beam but it is not doing much for the photo anyway.
Reminds me of the old Taj Mahal song "Paint My Mailbox Blue"

I actually like it.

I think that it lacks significance. It's a blue mailbox. So what? If anything, it looks like a selective color experiment, which it is. But why should anyone bother looking at it except that you asked them to. It's not up to the quality of the best of your work. I actually skipped over it when I looked at your FAA page. The turquoise (robin?) eggs were more interesting, and the selective color more appropriate.

Dead center subject composition and selective color are 2 of my pet peeves... but to each their own. I'll leave it at that.

Boring snap shot of a mailbox colored blue. Ask yourself - would you buy it? The composition has no depth to draw the viewer into the scene, the subject is dead center and the jarring house number takes all attention away from the color.

Nice to practice on but as you develop your eye, shots like this will be tossed in the delete bin. Or won't be taken in the first place because you'll see a better compositions.

I love this poem by Jay Maisel:

If it doesn't excite you,
the thing that you see,
then why in the world
would it excite me?

Words to photograph by.

Very insightful. Thanks for all of your critiques, going to take the photo down now. A very good quote to keep in mind, Edward. Will try to remember that next time I go out shooting!

It's a nice photo of a mailbox, but why would someone need a picture of a blue mailbox, or what is the significance of the mailbox being blue? There should always be a reason for using a feature, and if there is not a reason then you probably shouldn't use it.

You could salvage the image by perhaps changing the numbers on the box to letters and make it say something like SAD, or something relevant to the blues or depression. Then it might make sense.

usually i find the images that work best are the ones that already have almost no color. a chess board, cement, a stone building. because otherwise its really noticeable, when someone takes the color out of red tulips (which become black after), leaving that one yellow one. i think i have 3 selectives in my folder, but only because they happen to be that way.

---Mike Savad