Who regularly critiques your images?

Flying Free (note the bug!). Boulder, Colorado, 2012

Although there are others, it’s my wife who does this on a regular basis–and the more she does it, the better she does. Maybe I’ll come back after a morning shoot with 100 images on the card, I’ll work on maybe a dozen in Lightroom and Photoshop, then show them to her. After she has her say, usually only a couple make the cut as “keepers”. She is pretty honest and straight-forward with what she likes and what she doesn’t like, and I tend to agree with her verdicts about 80-90% of the time. (Definition of “honest and straight-forward”: “This photograph is terrible! It looks like a crappy postcard!”)

It’s always impressive how someone else can give you such a completely different perspective on your photography. They will point out things you hadn’t noticed…or give you ideas that hadn’t occurred to you for composition, lighting, or post-processing…or they will like stuff you thought was bad…or they will hate stuff you thought was good…and so on.

Whoever you have critique your images will, of course, have their own biases and their own personal tastes. Take that into account when you hear what they have to say. Heck, you may completely disagree with their analysis! That’s perfectly OK. Take what they say, ingest it, munch on it, then you can either spit it out or digest it–either way it will make you a better photographer.

In the end, though, if you have someone give you honest feedback you will definitely push that learning curve into a slightly steeper incline than it otherwise would have had.