Guidelines for the Professional Critique Forum

About the Professional Critique section
Critiques are valuable to a photographer no matter what their experience level.  The difficulty comes in finding a place to get your work critiqued that is not either too soft or to hard.  We have opened the Professional Critique section here on the Photo Arts Forum to fill in that void.

Our goal is to have you take the critiques given and use them to become a better photographer.

What to expect
Having your work critiqued can be a painful and humbling experience.  Understand that our critique panel is here to help you get better.  Everything said will be towards that goal.  If you can accept the critiques as help and not as a personal attack they will help you to improve. 

About the panel
We have put together a group of professional photographers to act as the panel for our professional critique section.  Between them they have decades of experience in photography.  It was also important to us that our panel came from different parts of the world since photography often shows regional differences.

How to submit your work for critique
This forum is open to any of our members to post their work for critique.   For the time being we are not putting any limits on how many submissions you can make, but we may change that policy depending on how busy this section becomes so that we do not overwhelm the panel with critique requests.

A few guidelines

• Please only submit your best work or work that you know needs help to get from a great image to an outstanding image.
• Submit one image at a time.   It is very difficult for our panel to review more than one image at a time.  If you have a series of images that you would like reviewed, please select one representative image out of the set and submit it here.  If you would like to submit the others, please do so on the other sharing boards that we have available.
• Please be patient.  Our panel is volunteering their time to help our members become better photographers.
• Let our panel know how the photograph was taken.  The easiest way for us to get information on your image is for you to attach it to the post rather than linking to another site.  Our forum is set up to pull EXIF data out of attached images so that the camera data will be available.  We would also like any other information you can share on how the image was made – tripod, lighting, posing plan, etc.
• Any member can start a thread, but only our panel and the original poster can reply to threads.  This lets us keep the critiques in this section limited to our panel but still allows dialog between the poster and our panel.
• No whining   We are here to help you improve.  Nothing said is a personal attack or intended to make you feel bad.  Our panel is trying to help you improve.