If you cant say something nice...

Remember your mother and teachers telling you if you cant "say something nice, don't say anything"? While most people try to follow such advice, it shouldn't include constructive criticism. A good blogger not only has a responsibility to produce interesting content. Its important to try for a dialog or conversation with your readers.

If you are trying to engage someone in a conversation, commenting on or responding to their posts is important. It is considered good blogging etiquette. Offering constructive criticsm goes a long way toward winning readers not to mention respect.

5 questions for user friendly critiques

• What is the most successful/least successful part of the photo and why?


• Does the image trigger an emotional response in you? Anger, calm, envy?


• Are you passionate about the content of the image? Does it invoke happy or sad memories?
  
• Did the photo remind you of someone elses work or something awesome that you have seen?


• Does the photo touch a nerve, stir up a controversy, take a stand that you agree with or disagree with?

Learn from each other

Some people like to include the details about how they took a shot, set it up or processed it in photoshop. Other times they just put up the pic. It is perfectly ok to ask politely, "how did you get that!" More specifically ask:

• about the photographer's creative vision, settings they used and why they used them.
• about an expressive portrait or more specifically how the look came to be on the model's face.
• what decisions did you make and what ones were dictated by the conditions
• choice of subject or location and time of day
• What would you do differently next time

Make a suggestion:

Suggestions put politely are not offensive to most people especially if they are honest. Things you might consider as a suggestion include:

• cropping to highlight or center a main point in the frame or using the rule of 1/3.
• an idea for images in a series.
• suggest a different color sepia, black & white or high contrast and saturation.
• suggest a tutorial if you've seen one on the subject

Keep up the good work on your blogs I really like them and would enjoy them more if we did some better writing and comments!