give the gift of a critique

As a professor of photography, I run critique sessions every week. And more and more, I watch the same thing happen: someone puts up a photograph they worked hard on, and the room's first instinct is a fast verdict: "I like it," "nice light," "good composition." Rarely does anyone actually slow down and look before deciding whether they think something works.

It's not just students. It's all of us. Scrolling has trained us to react to an image in half a second and move on. Even people who genuinely want to give a thoughtful critique often don't know how to slow down long enough to actually do it.

That's what this tool is for. It walks you through the same rigorous process I use in my own classroom: describing what's actually in the frame before you interpret it, forming a real claim about what the photograph means, and only then weighing whether it succeeds. This way, the critique you hand someone isn't a reflex. It's earned.

It takes at least ten minutes, the longer you take the bigger the gift. The only thing you need is a digital file of the photograph you’re critiquing and a webcam so the tool can gauge where your attention goes. Nothing is stored or saved.

If you’re interested in learning more about the process Claude and I went through to create this tool (which came out of a larger tool called Visual Literacy in the Age of Machine Vision), Claude and I made a page about that, too.