SOTW entry

hmm, looks a bit too large with a ton of negative space. Not sure how much you actually did to the stock, but the lighting looks good although I would remove or dim the one farthest back to put the focus solely on the focal point. Needz depth. I don't like the border effects, but that's personal preference I suppose. The text is a little to bright IMO, but good beyond that.

Goodluck in the contest, mang.

 

I like it, but it could use more bright areas on the left side to balance it out.. and I'm not a big fan of the border. Good luck on the contesst

 

Excess blurring me thinks... try balancing the light and dark with some light on the left side.. You can blur, but not to that degree. Try blurring the background instead of all of the left side. Also, now the kid sticks out too much, seems like he's not even part of the picture... and I just realized there's text.. I like how it's sharper in the first one, I can barely make out the F in the second.

To me, it looks like you could crop out the whole left side and it'd look better, just 'cause it's not balanced at all, and looks offputting at leas to me

 

What erico said. The background is what you want to blur, not anything that's not around the focal. Cropping would do nicely IMO.

 

Regardless of how it looks, it's too big for SOTW.

Onward to CnC.

Great choice for BnW though, very lonely, dark, and melancholy stock, however there is to much negative space going on, but thats purely because you used the entire stock, or atleast a good portion of it.

Cropping it to just the area around the focal would make more sense, for a sig atleast. My reccomendation is to crop it, and possible add some faded light rays using the pen tool or something, to give an even more depressed look to it.

I love to stock you've chosen, but it might be alittle awkward for a sig because at the current hight, the focal is big enough, and you can see the top bunk, aswell as the light source. Sizing it down would reduce the focal size, making it to small, so thats probably your toughest problem to tackle with this.

 

Again, way too much blurring imo. Should erase the blurring in the foreground just so it fits nicely with the depth of the boy. The border is a bit cliche... it's something that most photo editing programs have as a generic border and, as a result, amateurs tend to use.

Not to be a jerk, but I'm not really sure why you added the streams of light. Goes against the flow of the rails imo, which go left the right (and the streams go top to bottom).