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.

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