General critique/ portfolio review?

Hey all,

I think I'm getting to a point where I could benefit from an outside opinion not on any one single photo, but on my portfolio - for lack of a better word, because "the bunch of pictures that I think are good enough to show people without embarrassing myself" is way too long to type out more than once. I'm finally starting to understand how I like to take pictures, and I'm not going to call it a style but there is some consistency in my keepers.

I'm sure any one of my shots has a number of issues we could debate in single-image critique threads, but what I'd like is more general advice or feedback from experienced people (friends and family are just not cutting it for this) on my portfolio. Again, quote-unquote portfolio. Things like - and those are all made up:
- "you're oversharpening, dial it down"
- "too much saturation"
- "for the love of god, work on your composition"
- "consider brightening the eyes of your subjects in post"
- "the rule of thirds is nice, but it doesn't need to be in every single picture"
- "technically okay, but boring stuff"
Basically, things that are apparent throughout a number of my pictures and that I'm too close to notice myself.

I understand it's quite a bit of work for whoever does the review, and I'm actually not trying to hoist this on you guys. So here's my actual question: how does one go about getting that kind of feedback? Is there a service you must pay for, to have someone spend a couple hours sifting through your shots? Do you just put a thread up in the Critique Corner and hope that it's going to be a slow day at work for a few people?

Host it somewhere. Preferably your own site, but you could put them in a set (or group of sets) on Flickr or some other hosting service*. Then post the thread like this in either the Critique or the Presentation board.

It may take a couple days to get some feedback, but you should get some. You may have to bump it if it goes unnoticed for a couple of days.

There are varying opinions the "rules" of what to put in a portfolio. My general opinion is to have one moderately small set of your best work for each genre of work that you do. Personally, I have four sets - portraiture, products, events, and "fun stuff" - with ten to twelve images in each set - but I have extended sets available for those who want to see them. I wouldn't put a whole event in my port, I would pick the one shot that is THE BEST from that event, and put it in the port set - then include the link to the full set from that particular event.


* I sometimes have time to C&C while at my day job, if I'm waiting on a long database query or calculation to complete. But most dedicated hosting sites like Flickr are blocked.

armis wrote in post #14760941
Hey all,

I think I'm getting to a point where I could benefit from an outside opinion not on any one single photo, but on my portfolio - for lack of a better word, because "the bunch of pictures that I think are good enough to show people without embarrassing myself" is way too long to type out more than once. I'm finally starting to understand how I like to take pictures, and I'm not going to call it a style but there is some consistency in my keepers.

I'm sure any one of my shots has a number of issues we could debate in single-image critique threads, but what I'd like is more general advice or feedback from experienced people (friends and family are just not cutting it for this) on my portfolio. Again, quote-unquote portfolio. Things like - and those are all made up:
- "you're oversharpening, dial it down"
- "too much saturation"
- "for the love of god, work on your composition"
- "consider brightening the eyes of your subjects in post"
- "the rule of thirds is nice, but it doesn't need to be in every single picture"
- "technically okay, but boring stuff"
Basically, things that are apparent throughout a number of my pictures and that I'm too close to notice myself.

I understand it's quite a bit of work for whoever does the review, and I'm actually not trying to hoist this on you guys. So here's my actual question: how does one go about getting that kind of feedback? Is there a service you must pay for, to have someone spend a couple hours sifting through your shots? Do you just put a thread up in the Critique Corner and hope that it's going to be a slow day at work for a few people?

yes, put it in the "critique corner" ! Along with this site there are tons of photo sites where people are very willing to critique photos

Also, don't put too many photos in your portfolio. No one wants to look through 50 photos from someone they'v never heard of. 10-20 representative photos is going to elicit much more response than pages and pages of thumbnails to wade through.

Well, too late I guess.

I decided to leave them all because I thought patterns would be more obvious. I'm really just hoping for someone to go "next... next... next... next... hmm this guy really needs to straighten his horizons/ stop pushing the colors so much/ balance his compositions/ etc." with just a few minutes' worth of browsing. As you say, whether it's 10-20 or 50 pictures, nobody has the time to go through all that in detail for some random username on the internet .

armis wrote in post #14767574
Well, too late I guess.

Those links in the thread appear broken.

PhotosGuy wrote in post #14770167
Those links in the thread appear broken.

Do they? I just had someone try for me and it seemed to work... All four of them or one in particular?

armis wrote in post #14771352
Do they? I just had someone try for me and it seemed to work... All four of them or one in particular?

I just tried the first two which led to a Google page that wanted a password.

works for me, I think you need to be logged into google