One of the new features at NatureVisions this year is that you can sign up for an “image review”—a chance to meet with one of the photographers on the faculty and have him or her critique a dozen of your photos. I’m always interested in hearing feedback from photographers who are a few notches (or, more often, more than a few!) above me, so I happily paid the $60 fee to spend 20 minutes getting feedback from Steve Gettle.

This evening I finished figuring out which 12 images to take to the review, and I thought I’d share a few here. One is a macro, or close-up, photo of a katydid from a trip to the Tambopata region of Peru in August 2016:

I have all kinds of things I wonder about it: Do the eyes pop enough? Is enough of it in focus? Is it artsy enough to enter into a competition, or is it too plain, too monochromatic? But I think the important thing when I’m meeting with Steve next weekend is to just keep my mouth shut as each image comes up on the screen, and see what he says, unprompted. And if he says, “It just doesn’t work, and here’s why,” my job is to listen and learn.

Next is a least auklet from St. Paul Island, in the Bering Sea, this past July:

These little seabirds are adorable, and I love that this one is making direct eye contact with the viewer. I also kinda like the simplicity of the image, but I also could see how some people would see it as too plain. And I do wonder if the bird is out of proportion to the rock it’s sitting on; the rock sorta dwarfs the bird (and especially its tiny head). Maybe I should crop in closer. Again, I’m going to just keep quiet and see what Steve says. He may well notice entirely other problems with the image, for all I know.

And here are two images of a frog (I wish I knew what kind) from that same 2016 Peru trip. The first one is the frog on an interesting piece of vegetation (again, I wish I knew what kind):

I remember showing this to my brother, who’s a professional photographer, and he thought that the cool contours of the vegetation maybe detracted from the frog. I’m not sure.

The second version has the added interest of an insect that the frog is looking at, but unfortunately the insect is out of focus:

I’m assuming that the fuzziness of the insect undercuts the quality of the photo—but, again, I’ll be curious to see what Steve says.

I’m really looking forward to all of the sessions at NatureVisions. I’ll probably tweet bits and pieces of advice I hear via my Twitter account in real time, and I hope to share some of my notes here after I get back.