jreades

I had seen this shot on one of the many times I passed this way along Lac Leman (unless I'm seriously off it looks *very* familiar))! My only suggestion would be that a greater DOF would have given the shot even more impact. But congratulations none the less!

I'm not sure about the yellow frame -- it doesn't fit with the "City Melancholy" tag in the lower-right... it would be stronger, IMO, with a darker frame or no frame at all so that the colours of the shot speak for themselves. There also appears to be a lot pixelation -- perhaps an artifact of scanning? or taking a low-res shot?

I'm not sure, but I think that this needs a little more contrast (i.e. some burning) towards the horizon and around the transition from sand to sea to sky -- something seems slightly out-of-focus back there (yes, I realise those are clouds) and I think that a touch higher contrast would really pull this photo together. The only other thing that I might suggest is that perhaps moving slightly off to the right and turning the camera left a little bit would strengthen the movement of the fence across the photo. Please take this as well-meant critique, not criticism, as this is the type of photo that I like to try to take as well (with much more limited success).

This was brilliantly caught, I've never seen a dragonfly (?) photographed like this. The way it appears to be playing peekabo is quite comical. In a really trivial nipick, I'd love to see the legs in slightly sharper focus, but I'm guessing that that was impossible because of the apperture.

Prevor -- I think that the photo was well-taken, but if I had to pick between this and the one with the stones, I'd definitely go with the one with the stones in foreground.

 

I think that the other photo picks up the isolation of the chapel more strongly (and if you were to pull back further and move it out from the centre of the grame the effect would be even stronger).

 

This is purely my own preference, but what makes Santa Maria spectacular is its situation -- it appears to be throughly alone on the mountain and this creates tension with its environment which is what usually creates interest in the photo. Of course, all of this is easy for *me* to say because I wasn't there trying to take the photo, and had I been there I'm sure that I would have gone for the exact same shots.

I really like the way that the extreme wide angle turns a line into a long, smooth curve -- it seems like a technique that could be applied with striking results elsewhere.

 

In the context of *this* photo, I wonder if cropping it down to zero in on the area of interest (which to me is the stands) would give the photo more punch? I'd particularly like to trim off the track at the bottom since it seems both slightly out of focus at either end of the track as you get towards the edge of the lens, and there doesn't seem to be as much of interest going on as there is in the curvature of the stands.