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Photo Critique + Editing Breakdown of my BEST photos of 2020-21 // You should join a photo contest!
Why are my best images of 2020-2021 not good enough to win a photo contest? I will discuss this will criticizing my photos and making a detailed editing breakdown. I will also let you know why you should also be joining a photo contest, even if you don't think your images are "good enough"...
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📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Introduction
00:35 - Why you should join a photo competition?
01:18 - What I am looking for?
02:24 - Photo #1: Photo Critique
04:00 - Photo #1: Editing breakdown
05:41 - Photo #2: Photo Critique
06:49 - Photo #2: Editing breakdown
08:11 - Photo #3: Photo Critique
09:03 - Photo #3: Editing breakdown
10:20 - Photo #4: Photo Critique
11:32 - Photo #4: Editing breakdown
12:54 - Photo #5: Photo Critique
13:43 - Photo #5: Editing breakdown
15:00 - Photo #6: Photo Critique
16:02 - Photo #6: Editing breakdown
16:18 - Which one did I dismiss?
17:46 - Conclusion - Thanks for watching
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- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:35 Why you should join a photo competition?
- 1:18 What I am looking for?
- 2:24 Photo #1: Photo Critique
- 4:00 Photo #1: Editing breakdown
- 5:41 Photo #2: Photo Critique
- 6:49 Photo #2: Editing breakdown
- 8:11 Photo #3: Photo Critique
- 9:03 Photo #3: Editing breakdown
- 10:20 Photo #4: Photo Critique
- 11:32 Photo #4: Editing breakdown
- 12:54 Photo #5: Photo Critique
- 13:43 Photo #5: Editing breakdown
- 15:00 Photo #6: Photo Critique
- 16:02 Photo #6: Editing breakdown
- 16:18 Which one did I dismiss?
- 17:46 Conclusion - Thanks for watching
okay so last week i asked all of you which photos i should select for my first ever photo contest and thank you so much for all your answers in this video i'm gonna do a photo critique of my six best pictures of the last year doing an editing breakdown of each of them and let you know which one i decided to eliminate in the end let's roll the intro for those of you who are new to this channel i'm like ben mahalford a young photographer and filmmaker on a journey to become better at this art before jumping into the photos i want to tell you why you should also participate in a photo contest it's been years that people told me that i should participate in a photo contest but i never felt that my pictures were good enough but what i realized is that going through my pictures with a critical eye during the last year really helped me learn some things from those photos and this is the reason why i think you should join a contest or at least select your top five pictures from the last year the photo contest i'm joining is still open and it's organized by now joe danson another youtuber so i'm gonna have a link in the description down below another nice benefit of this contest is actually that all the funds go to an environmental cause so this is pretty neat for landscape photographers now let's jump right into the first picture here before creating this picture i want to talk about what i'm looking for because there's some very important things to look for when you're submitting a picture for photo contest so the first thing you want to look for are the basics you want to be sure that your horizon is level that the photo is sharp that your exposure is correct and all of these other basic things inside of photography that are super important the second thing you want to look for is that it has a wow factor and that's because it's going to be compared to so many other good pictures that it needs to very quickly distinguish itself from dinner ones so you can have a really good picture but if it doesn't have the wow factor it might not be as visible for the people that are looking at them very quickly to judge them uh in the end the last thing you want to have is longevity and this is a little bit harder thing to understand but instead of just looking at the picture and understanding everything instead of it within a second or two you want to have a picture that takes a little bit more time to analyze and go through all the image and that's what makes a better picture in the end all of these are inspired from tips from nigel danson so i'm going to link his video where he goes in more depth about all of these in the description down below if you want to learn more about it okay so if we look at the image right here we're gonna see that it's a pretty strong image to start with so all the basics are there and they're okay but if we look at here what is very interesting is that we have very strong uh leading lines right here so if you look at the dock right here it points towards the sunset which is the first thing you're gonna see in the picture but also we also have the lines right here that are all pointing towards the sunset in the back here so this is really strong and leading your eye through the image the second thing i want to talk about here is that it's actually a almost dual tone image we have a lot of bright colors inside of the sunset but the rest of the image is very desaturated and this really brings your eye to the sense in the background and makes it pop a lot more compared to the rest here then if we look at the longevity of this image we're gonna see that we actually have a lot of things to look to so we start by looking at the sunset then you realize there's a dock then you realize that there's a kayak right here and then you realize that there's maybe like more cottages here and finally realize that there's even ice on the water here so all of these things make it much longer to look to and analyze i think that there's one really big point about this image and is that everything is actually located on the left side of the image so if we look at it here we're going to see that we have the kayak here that we have the sunset on this side but we don't have much of anything on the other side here and this is a problem because you want to have a balance between both sides of the image and this is not the case inside of the picture and because it's very symmetrical this doesn't work as well in the end now if we close this and look at the edit here we're gonna see that the original image didn't look at all as the same thing so the first thing i did is come inside of here and just adjust the light so i brought down the highlights a lot because you can set it on the original one there was way too much uh highlights inside of the sky so i brought back all that detail then box brought up the shadows a lot just to bring some detail inside of the trees here uh then if you look at the color we're actually going to see i didn't touch them that much in the end so i just brought up some vibrancy i didn't touch the saturation too much then i went inside of cooler mix here and i did some small adjustments so i brought up the saturation of the reds and brought down the hue of the reds and brought some uh orange up and also the luminance of the orange and this is just to make the adjustment to make really the colors in the sky pop but not modify the rest of the image to leave the wrist pretty desaturated in the end then if you look at the other tabs here if you look at the effects tab i didn't touch anything so i don't use effects that much in the end if we look at details here i applied some little noise reduction just to be sure that the trees here are pretty nice and sharp because if we remove the noise reduction we're gonna see that there's some color noise inside of the trees here so i just wanted to make sure that i didn't have that another important thing in this it was actually to make sure that my horizon was level so i really played with it a lot because it's kind of tricky in this scene to see if it's leveled or not but this is super important so i passed a lot of time just bringing it up and down a little bit until i was satisfied with the acidity i also cropped it a little bit to remove trees on the side here that were some distraction just to make it a little bit cleaner and make sure that my dock was perfectly centered inside of the image okay so if i look at the second picture here i think that there's an absolute wow factor to this picture right away because of the very nice and bright colors of the sky what i really liked inside of this picture is that the colors are not really over saturated they're just kind of pastel and really nice tones that are like a graduated colors growing from one to the other there's also a nice reflection from the sky inside of the bottom water here so this is a pretty great image overall one thing that's good to know is that this picture was taken at 200 millimeters that that means i was pretty zoomed in and this is a trick that i use to take sunsets because most of the time the sunset is not nice everywhere in the sky so by focusing in some parts of the image you're really able to capture the best parts of the sunset i think there's one small weak point inside of this image it's actually i think it's missing some little details inside of it for have to have a better longevity so if i had like some birds at the top here or had maybe let's say like a boat like right here or something like that it could make the picture even better and more interesting to look at because right now it's just a sunset and there's not much else to this picture in the end but that's really just a small detail about this image so now let's delete the screenshot and go inside of the editing here so if we look at the light here again it's pretty standard so i bring down the highlights bring up the shadows but it wasn't as extreme in this picture one pretty big difference here is actually that i brought down the blacks quite a lot to a lot more contrast inside of the trees here to really make the sunset pop and separate them from the foreground then if we go on the colors here we're going to see that i brought up the vibrance but that's pretty much all i did to the image i did play a little bit with the hue and saturation of the red and orange but that's all i did to this picture because the colors were already pretty good looking at the beginning now if you go into the effects this is one thing that i used is adding some texture so i usually don't add texture to this picture but just to make sure that the trees were really sharp and detailed here i added some texture because i also added if we come on the next tab here quite a lot of noise reduction and if you're adding a lot of noise reduction you actually have to compensate usually by adding a little bit more sharpening or texture inside of the picture but be careful when using texture because it can make your image worse pretty quickly if you use it too much now if we look at the original one we're gonna see here that's very gray and not very pleasing but as a raw picture it's normal that it comes out like that we have all the information after that to edit it and bring back all the colors as you wish in the end this next picture is one that most people tend to really like but it's not the best picture for phone contest because astrophotography is a very specific sub jar and in terms of astrophotography this is not the best picture that there is out there but if you look at this picture there's still a lot of things that are good about this first is that the basics are on point it can be pretty hard taking pictures of the stars i have videos on that if you want to learn more but the basics here on point everything is sharp the stars are looking nice and crisp so that's not a problem at all what i think is very interesting inside of this picture is that we have a foreground here that actually adds some detail to the picture and just makes it more interesting to look at because if we didn't have the foreground here with the water reflection with the light and everything it would just be a black foreground and that wouldn't be interesting at all inside of the picture we also have a lot of details here in the microwave which just make it a little bit better but now if we look at the edit if we look at the original one we actually can see we don't see the stars that much and that's the reality when you're outside and looking at the stars you actually see something a bit more like that than when you have the final edited image for this we're gonna see that that light here is pretty basic the colors adjustment i just brought up the color temperature because if we go back to the original one we see it was a little bit too blue for my taste and then didn't touch the colors here too much at all didn't apply much every effect but did apply just a little bit of noise reduction this can be important because most of the idiots are happening inside of the mask right here and the huge thing for stars is actually to apply a mask on the top part of your image on your sky and then go in and fix and apply some clarity this is really going to bring out all the stars inside of the sky so if we bring this down we're going to see it makes a huge effect on the stars then if you go on the light here i just brought up a little bit the highlights just to bring back the white inside of the stars then if we go on the mask here on the milky way i actually brought up a lot more contrast highlights and whites in the milky way to really make it pop a lot more then i went inside of the colors here and brought up the saturation on the milky way really to bring back the colors from the milky way inside of this photo this next image is another pretty nice one and it actually has a pretty nice wow factor because of the fall colors here and also all of the fog inside of the image and you can see that the next three images are all from the same morning and sometimes the conditions are just right to get better pictures so that's why you always need to go out as much as possible and take the most pictures to really get the conditions that are going to make better pictures here so if you look at this one i actually like it quite a lot because uh you have like the island right here but they have nice separation after that uh between the mountains here but you also have all the fog that is kind of hiding away all the cottages at the bottom so if i zoom in inside of here and we look at this we're to see that there's actually a cottage right here but you cannot see it as much because of the fog that is hiding everything the fog also creates multiple layers so this helps for the longevity of the image but i do feel that one of the problems inside of this image right here is actually that it's a little bit empty on this side so there's not much to look for inside of the picture but the mist still compensates and creates a little bit more longevity because there's definitely some mystery about this image we're not sure what is behind all of this mist now if you look at the edit right here we're gonna see i think it's a pretty basic edit at the beginning so i'm bringing down the highlights again bringing up the shadows and if you go on the colors here again i bring up this vibrance not too much of the saturation just a little bit here to bring out the colors inside of the trees but then we feel like here i actually don't play at all with the other colors here i just leave them natural so these were pretty much the colors i actually saw when i was taking this picture different effects no effects here other than a little bit of dehaze and that's just because there was so much haze i wanted to see the trees just a little bit better so if we remove it here you could see and it just helps like really bring out some contrast inside of the trees if we look at the biggest idiot inside of the picture is actually that i applied a mask on the top part here so it was completely white and almost overblown so i actually had to apply a mask here and bring down the whites just to make it more a little bit more blue because you could see the blue and the bottom part of this image but you also want to see the blues inside of the sky to reflect what is happening in the water so that's one thing i had to apply just to bring back out that color i actually didn't apply much else inside of the color here other than bringing up the saturation really to make the colors come out inside of the sky but that's pretty much all i did on this picture so a pretty basic edit again but it's just because the scene was already pretty nice now if you move to the next image here it's probably my favorite one but this is a type of picture that probably doesn't work too well on social medias because it really needs to be blown out in a big format so you can see the detail especially the loon right in the center of this image right here so it's really a picture that i would like to print in a bigger format to put on a wall or something like that but if you look at this picture one of the things that isn't great about it is that you're missing some of that wow factor because you don't see that much inside the picture right away so it really looks like a blind canvas but it takes time to look at the picture and understand what is happening inside of it this is great for longevity because it does take time to realize that this is a loon right here so if you look at this there's a loom right here then you might realize that these are trees in the background and it's leading your way to the background here one thing um that is important inside of this picture is i wanted to have the loon really sharp inside of it so if you look at the edit i'm not going to go through everything because it's very similar to the previous image on how i did it but if we come inside of here we can see i brought out the vibrates quite a lot that's because if we remove it here we're gonna see there's not much inside of the trees here not much color so i've just brought up a lot of vibrance to make them pop a little bit more what is very important inside of this picture was first of all applying a couple of masks so first of all here we have a mask on the loon and this was very important to bring it out and make it pop a little bit more so i brought up the contrast i brought up the effects here to bring up the texture and also brought up some sharpness so all of this just makes it a little bit more sharp and make it pop compared to everything else inside of the image then there's what there was a weird artifact here so if i remove it here we can see it's a bit like yellow in the background so i just brought a mask here and remove the saturation just to make sure that this wasn't as distracting because it kind of looked like there was a problem inside of the image then here on the top part of the image if i go in the light i just bring down the whites a little bit just to make sure that we don't have pure white inside of the picture because you don't want to have things where the whites are completely clipped so this is important to apply a mask just to make sure that everything is just a little bit gray but not total white in the end let's move on to the last picture i didn't talk about the basics in the previous images but that's because they were all pretty much right and so i made sure that they were sharp that the horizon was level and everything like that so these are all things i do on any pictures right away when i start editing them but now if you look at here this picture i think that's a pretty nice one because you actually have like a little cottage here that's all surrounded by fog around it so it really brings up the cottage here you kind of have trees here that a little bit of the color from the fall colors but i think there's a big problem inside of this one is that there's not much longevity to this picture because when you look at it there's a lot of things happening on this side right here so you have the cottage you have the trees and everything but on this side there's nothing at all it's almost a blank canvas and there's not much to look at so it's really quick to look at this picture and it really shows that longevity is important because you look at this picture and you understand pretty much right away everything that happened inside of this picture now if we close it here and we look at the edit again it's very very similar to what i did for the other ones here so i'm not going to go into the details of this one because it's again pretty much just the basic that i did for the other shots again i applied just a little bit of dehaze always when i have a lot of haze like that i apply just a little bit of dehaze to bring a little bit more contrast on the parts of the image that should be clear so now the big question which one did i decide to eliminate and it's actually the last one here without a big surprise it's by far the one that got voted uh the most on instagram to eliminate and i think a big problem when i posted it on instagram is actually instagram crushed all the whites and made everything very white so that was a pretty big problem but more than that i think it's just a picture that like i said is missing a lot of longevity so i think to make this picture better what i would need is actually if we come here i would need like some a loon or something like that on the bottom here maybe birds on the top here or something like that just to add a little bit more interesting picture and have a better uh balance on the both sides so i feel like at this side it's really charged on this side but there's not much on this one so that's one thing i think that is really important to make this picture better is have a little bit more balance and something to keep inside of your head it's also just that this side is very empty uh so it just looks like it's white so it's not as interesting and there's not as much of this wow factor inside the pictures because we don't see as much the colors inside of the trees or anything like that even though it was taken the same day as the two previous ones where we see much more the colors inside of the trees so this is the one i removed the five other ones are submitted for the contest and i still think that all of my pictures are pretty good some people thought i was a little bit too harsh on myself when talking about my pictures but i think it's very important to be critical of your own pictures to understand what is good or not inside of them i hope you enjoyed this little video about the critique of my photos and how i did them so please let me know if you enjoyed it by hitting the like button below and also consider subscribing to the channel for more content of photography and filmmaking see you in the next one bye
Video Links
- 🔗 CONTEST
- 🔗 NIGEL'S VIDEO
- Astrophotography videos
- PHONE vs DSLR
- Get better images (the easy way!)
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- TikTok
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD
- DJI MAVIC AIR
- http://bit.ly/loicba
What is this video about?
I've been putting off entering photo contests for years, convinced my work wasn't ready. But recently, I realized that selecting my best images from the last year and studying them critically taught me more than I expected. In this video, I'm walking through six of my strongest shots from 2020 and 2021—reviewing them honestly, showing you exactly how I edited each one, and sharing why I think you should submit work to a contest too.
Before diving into the photos, I want to explain what I'm actually looking for in contest submissions. There are three key things: first, the basics (sharp focus, level horizon, correct exposure); second, the wow factor (something that stops you immediately when you're scrolling through dozens of images); and third, longevity (layers of detail that keep you looking, discovering something new each time). I borrowed this framework from Nigel Danson's video, and it's been really useful for evaluating my own work.
Then I go through each image—a sunset over a dock with leading lines, a moody pastel sky with water reflection, an astrophotography shot with foreground detail, three autumn landscapes from the same misty morning. For each one, I show you the original raw file (which honestly looks pretty flat) and walk through my Lightroom adjustments: how I recovered blown-out highlights, brought up shadow detail, adjusted color temperature, applied selective masks, and boosted texture on specific elements like the Milky Way or a bird.
Some edits are straightforward (bringing down highlights, raising shadows, a touch of vibrance). Others involve masks on the sky or on small details like a loon—pulling out contrast, sharpness, and saturation just in that area. I also talk about the practical choices: using dehaze when there's fog, adding texture to compensate for noise reduction, and being careful not to clip the whites into pure white.
By the end, I eliminate the weakest image—the one that's missing longevity and balance. The other five are submitted. But here's the thing: I still think all my pictures are good. Being critical doesn't mean tearing yourself down. It means understanding what works, what could be stronger, and why. That's how you actually improve.