strawman

As a thought I think you are missing out a lot by posting all these variants as one. For me the 4th shot works best, and the mod posted by Phil gets more from it. Its a good shot of the two boys with character and I think that is important.

for the 1st shot the lad looks a bit nervous and he is not holding the guitar in a confident manner plus some of it has crept out of the frame. And the background is too visible and wrinkled. I guess you could get rid of that in photoshop. were you using lights? or available light. I am trying to make out if its a softbox or window reflected in his eye. I would try and move him forward from the background if possible, and if lights, could you put a light/more light into the background.

Everything is subjective but I hope that helps.

Some clever posing here, the way you have the hour glass of her waist and her stance tapering her legs down again. But has her right arm fallen too much outside the light from your flash? and it looks like she is about to fall over.

Hello, ok here are my thoughts in no order but I hope they help.

First off it looks like there is a colour cast, it has a green tinge. This is probably a white balance problem. setting the camera to cloudy may have helped.

I created a mod image to try and help. First I used the remove colour cast tool and sampled off the white bit of the bird. Then I adjusted the saturation and reduced the green channel.

After that I looked at the levels and brought the black level to the right a bit to increase contrast. I think this makes the image look a bit better.

Composition wish it would be nice to get closer but that is difficult. It would be good to put the bird a bit bigger in the frame.

I hope this helps John

I like elements of the image. The white hill side, the wall winding its way past the frosty trees.

My advice would be to think of composition. what attracts the eye, what leads it through the picture. So when I look to the hill I see the wall winding on its way and I linger to see more.

The composition in the lower half of the picture is not so clear to me.

OK read your depth of field guides, look up the depth of field for your lens at the camera setting and check what focus point you had active. Its a small image, but was it focused on the chair.

Remember if you have more than one point selected it will grab the AF point with the closest object.

First of I am uncertain why this image has escaped critique or comment, it is interesting.

I guess the biggest problem is for the detail it conveys, the image looks small. Blow this up and it will look better, which comes to my main critique, the fake border robs you of image size. as a mounted image fine, but here it makes your image even smaller.

So what do I like, the warmth of the light, good choice of viewing point and the long shadows add to the interest. The crop on the image works well too.

In short I like it, lets see more of it.

OK I did a mod as I sort of agree with the other posts, so a crop down a burn in of the banana that is burnt out, and a reduction in saturation and reduction in the yellow colours to try and make it look more like banna.

But it is an interesting view and the butterfly looks very large compared to the small bug. And the eyes as ever look good.

The ski tracks are good your eye follows them, but you go out of the frame.

Was there a way to either crop in closer and go for the abstract, or was it possible (not always) to move your self round a bit more and follow them to another hill behind?

Does cropping down help add to the drama, and would a tight crop to the ski tracks help?

I uploaded a mod for you, with a flip.

When you upload to the critique section it helps if you give some comments as to what it is you want help/thoughts on, or tell us what you were trying to achieve.

Its an interesting piece of architecture but I think there are a couple of things you need to think on

1 The Horizon is wonky
2 There looks to be lens flare in the sky.

This is often caused by UV filters so could you take it off, or could you clone it out.

I have left a modification

Frank The easy way to do this would be to put the camera on a tripod and take a couple of shots at different exposures. So for the main building I would have had a slightly longer exposure, this would get more detail into the brickwork and foreground, plus the sky would have blown out, or be close to that. Load it into photoshop and delete the sky, it should be easy to do with the colour wand.

Then take the shot again with a much shorter exposure so you get sky detail, but the building will be very dark.. In photoshop load the other photo onto a layer above you new one, the sky should shine through from the darker image.

Or you could research HDR which is a software way of blending these images with different exposure together.

You asked for an honest critique, so

I think you have a couple of issues.

First the lighting. The flash has been very harsh, resulting in red eye, and a large variation in the range and intensity of the light. Was it the built in flash? I would think about could you have taken the shot without flash? Or could you have used a more diffused flash source or even some off-camera lights.

Next viewing angle, could you be lower down at their level. You are looking down on them and that spoils the photo's.

Betty Boo, is just tacky and demeans the animals.

Next the bate is very obvious and it does not look at all natural. Look into hiding the food in something that may be in the natural environment.

You use the title Wild Dorset, but you have put in too many domestic links in your photo’s. It is obviously in a garden with food left out for them.

Its a good phoot well taken.

Composition wise the train bothers me, I would have it central or more obviously on the 1/3, its offset just now and that detracts IMHO.

So I would either have taken a wider view or cropped in tighter to the train.

Tricky steve as it looks like you in many ways achieved your objective, but.

I would have looked at whether the fence could have been used more, could you have positioned yourself closer to a fence post and made some more foreground interest, or altered the viewpoint so the green path starts in the bottom left corner, flanked by fields of the seed rape.

You wanted critique, so a couple of thoughts.

There is motion blur so it looks like you did not have a high enough shutter speed. Also there is still a lot of detail in the background. What controls does you camera offer? If you could open the lens more and use a higher ISO speed if possible that would help.

The motion blur is hard to help with. For the background you could use the burn in and blur tools. Set them to a low value and using a mid sized brush you could try gently running them over the background.

On the pose it looks like you put a lot of food out, try a bit less or try and put a pearch near the food to catch them just before or after they get the food.

Also how about viewing point, would being lower have helped you?

A pleasing image, my thoughts to alter it.

It would be nice to have a bit more sky over the house, it looks a bit trapped. Also you could clone out the bits of tree/bush just creeping into the cloud at the right. My last temptation would be to select the water and see if I could make it a bit less murky by playing with the Hue & saturation or levels.

The sky has drama and that's good, but I think your colours have gone wrong. Its over saturated and the white balance looks wrong. A different white balance and lower saturation will help, or try converting it to BW. Also you may want to try a different JPEG strategy as it has artefact's on the image.

Finally with such craft, try leaving a bit more space in front of it, so it has something to move into.