I’m pretty sure I would like to go with cfmoto for my first bike. Their features and price are very attractive. Plus many local dealers carry them. Anyways, I’m struggling to decide between a sport bike or a naked style bike. I’m thinking the 675 model would be great to grow into as I learn.

I like the styling and design of the sport but I’ve seen in videos that sometimes they can be uncomfortable. To me it seems the naked would be less comfortable but I have no real experience with moto just mountain biking.

Any thoughts from more experienced riders? Or maybe anyone that owns one of them? Thanks in advance.

So I've been sitting on this one for a long time - it too comes from the January photos. I was inspired by another photographer who was posting abstract architectural photos on the reddit community and I wanted to try my hand at the style. I really like architectural photography, but it gets boring sometimes because it seems there's only a handful of good angles you can get of a particular building. So this kind of reinvigorated my creativity.

To give some perspective, the roof line of the building is on the left. I've rotated the photo around and to me it looks like a closeup shot of a much taller building with the clouds behind. I really like that. The junction box sitting there is a little distracting to me but it isn't so bad & I'd rather not edit things out of the photo. Not only is it usually obvious to me where my own edit took place but it also goes along with my hang up about being disingenuous in my photography.

I enjoy a lot of the texture here which was my main intrigue when snapping the photo. The wispy, smoke-like clouds remind me of the steam you see coming up from the streets sometimes. The weird metal facade over the concrete is just plain awesome to me - it looks soft and rigid at the same time. The concrete of the building has a nice smooth texture as well.

I'm not sure what to think of the lighting. I think the gray sky behind the white clouds is a little too dark. The building itself looks pretty cool to me and I really like how dark the windows turned out. And the whole photo might adhere too much to the rule of thirds, it kind of gives me that too-clean feeling.

Overall I think I did a pretty good job for a first go at this style!

I'm not sure what to do with this photo. It's from a series that I did back in January where the goal was to take at least one photo per day all in B&W. It was just something fun to do that would rekindle some inspiration and help me in a time I was feeling very uninspired.

I chose B&W to give myself less to think about when shooting. Too often with color photos I want to edit the colors to make them pop or look more like they did in my mind's eye when taking the photo. But with B&W that isn't so much of an issue for me because now the photo looks nothing like it did when I was shooting and can it kind of be it's own thing. I like that.

It's challenging for me to edit any photo, and this one is no different. I like that without color you can pump the contrast and exposure and really darken the shadows and make it kind of how you want just in messing with the light sliders. I'm pretty happy with how the lighting turned out. I wanted it to be very contrasty much like tri-x but when I did that intentionally it felt kind of wrong so I backed out and went with this. Maybe because the image is too clean and most of the shots I've seen on tri-x are very rough, gritty, etc.

As for the framing and whatnot, this photo is quite cropped. Originally I did not notice the man lying on the bench and was moreso just taking a shot of the tracks to pass the time waiting for the train. When I got back to view the photos I liked the way he was off to the side on the right of the frame but he wasn't the focus. So I cropped in maybe like 25% to get the frame we have here.

I like the emptiness/loneliness of the photo, but I feel like it's a bit too empty and is missing something to tie it all together nicely. I would have liked it better if maybe there was a group of people waiting near the man but no one was paying him any attention, just like I didn't notice him at first.

So, what are your thoughts on the edit? Should I go full crazy and blast the heck out of that contrast slider? Should I have cropped differently? I just feel like this could be a great photo and it's one I look at often. It just needs a little something more in my opinion.

ISO 100 | 50mm | f8 | 1/100s

We need a logo for our community! I have 0 skill when it comes to logo design or anything like that pretty much. I asked ChatGPT to make one and it came up with a pretty good sounding design with some pretty thoughtful elements

The logo features a camera lens as the central element. The lens is depicted >in a simplified and geometric style, with clean lines and rounded edges. It >symbolizes photography and serves as a visual representation of the >community's focus on critiquing photos.

Surrounding the lens, there are three speech bubbles, each representing >conversation, feedback, and critique. The speech bubbles indicate the >interactive and collaborative nature of the community, emphasizing the >importance of communication and discussions around photography.

The color scheme of the logo is a combination of vibrant blue and crisp white. >Blue represents trust, reliability, and professionalism, while white adds a >sense of purity and clarity. The contrast between the two colors enhances the >visual appeal and legibility of the logo.

I think that's a pretty good starting point but I'm down for whatever! I think it just looks weird with no logo! Any other ideas are TOTALLY welcome!

This one here is one of my all-time favorite interior photos. I absolutely love the gigantic windows and hate to think how expensive something like this would be.

As for the photo, I like everything about it. The staging was fantastic and the colors and design of the space works so well. I feel like these interior type photos are hard to critique because I really didn't do much work to get this photo. Just tripod positioning and the thought process to decide this was a good angle to capture.

I do think i should have raised the tripod. There may have been something preventing me from doing so. I know there was a catwalk style walkway overhead and maybe that ceiling line was butting into the frame when the tripod was higher...who knows! This photo was taken at least a year ago, but I think it's a great one to share!

This one right here is one of my most recent favorites. A couple weeks ago on Memorial Day weekend it rained the entire few days. So what better way to make the most of the rain than taking photos! I went to a local college that has a few very old, historic buildings ( a favorite subject of mine) that I'd been considering photographing for quite a while. And it was finally the time.

I set out with my rain jacket on, boots laced tight, and a grocery bag wrapped around my camera and lens to hopefully protect everything. I used a 1/8 promist filter stacked on top of a 1/4PM because I'm on a budget and can't afford a more dense mist filter just yet. These are also 72mm filters on a 48mm lens which just looked hilarious, but as you can see the results are pretty good!

Things I like: everything? but more seriously, my favorite part of the image has to be the red streak of brake lights directly over the bench on the right side of the frame. I wanted to show the bench in the photo but not bring too much attention to it and I think the red streak guides the eye over there and makes you wonder just a bit.

The glow and color of the lights inside the building are also just wonderful to me. I love some good lights! And the color of them was perfect for the atmosphere I was going after.

Things I don't like: I think the area in the middle of the frame is kind of uninteresting and needs a subject like someone strolling through with an umbrella and maybe walking a dog...that sort of thing. In order to mitigate this I tried using a wide ratio for the crop and I really think it works. The crop kind of makes two photos that are tied together by an uninteresting middle part that your eyes walk back and forth between to get to the more interesting parts of the image.

Anyways give me some feedback! What do you like? What do you not like? Do you hate it? All thoughts are welcome! :)

This one is a bit of a weird one for me. I don't usually photograph vehicles but this one really stood out to me mainly because of the license plate but it's also just a beautiful bike!

Anyways I really like how the light is shining off of different parts on the motorcycle especially the bright highlight on the gas tank and the tops of the engine. I also like the gradient on the rear tire. And I think the depth of field blur of the background is also sufficient and not too much bokeh and not too sharp - I think it looks very natural.

Things I don't like:

I think the background is too busy with the SUV and the work truck back there. If I were to take the shot again, I'd wait for the traffic to clear for sure. The owner of the motorcycle had seen me out there taking photos by this point and was talking my ear off about different aspects of it which did distract me from the photo and might have led to this mistake. I love meeting new people when doing street photography though!

This was my first time photographing live music! I took a ton of photos that evening and this is, by far, one of my favorites.

I really enjoy the purple tones of the lighting on the backdrop. I feel like purple is a pretty uncommon color overall and I think it really makes this image pop. I like the concentrated look on the player's face like he is really focusing on nailing all the notes. I believe they were playing Gold on the Ceiling.

Another aspect of this photo that I like is the angle of the bass itself because it accentuates the depth with the leading lines of the strings and the neck of the bass. It feels like it's coming out towards the viewer.

Some things I don't like:

I feel like the background is too busy. I tried to fix a few things in Lightroom and even removed the text on the big banner behind the player, but I still feel like it's too busy.

I feel like the microphone could be removed from the image. And I would do that, but I don't like spending hours on making the removal look as perfect as possible and instead will just try to mitigate those distraction in the future when shooting other performers.

There is a pole directly behind the cord to the bass that jumps out to me and looks like crappy masking or some sort of retouching, like the cord is glowing a bit because of that. Personally, this is really distracting to me and may warrant a crop to remove that altogether.

Looking forward to your thoughts!