spug

Thank you Wayne. Your comment is very much appreciated.

Daniel, thank you so much for your comments. This image took a lot of thinking out as well as time in the execution, so your words are very much appreciated.

 

All the best,

 

Stan

Thank you Lee. You are very kind,

Stan

Thank you.

Thank you both Rosario and Saad. I am so glad you like this.

Rosario, thank you very much

Thank you Warren. Nothing special about it really....just an arrangement of flower and cup on two sheets of red card, one vertical and one flat. The photo was taken on my dining room table with a north-facing window behind me. All the best, Stan

Thank you Saad.

Hi Sam, thanks for your kind words. This was shot some time ago with a Nikon using blue coloured paper and an Anglepoise lamp to provide the lighting. If it helps then there are a couple of tricks that I used. Firstly after taking the original I created several layers and blurred them, using layer masks to erase back to the edges that I wanted to keep sharp. By doing it a few times I could make sure that there was a gradation from sharp to blurred areas. The blurring possibly also would have reduced some of the ambient noise . That done I created a grey layer and used the PS noise filter on it before changing the blending mode to "soft light". Effectively I was adding grain creatively rather than trying to take it away. Again a layer mask was used with a soft brush to reduce the effect of the noise over critical areas such as edges. All the best, Stan.

Thanks Michael. Even here in Scotland we don't see as much snow as we used to. This was the first serious snow here on the East Coast for several years, although about seven years ago we did have a long cold spell. I once had a much older colleague who could not get home from work for a few weeks back in 1947. He described how he eventually walked the five miles home through the drifts hanging on to the overhead telephone wires for balance. Sadly it seems that global warming is not a myth.

[[show-photo-18467421]]

 

Thank you too Michael. To be honest I hadn't realised that this was an editor's pick before your comment. To explain a little about the image, my village was cut off by snow for several days and so I amused myself by going out into the fields and lanes with my camera. This photo was taken at the furthest point of one of these jaunts as I turned for home, and is at a spot that is interesting in summer because it is at the top of the hill. Just over the brow of the hill is a crossroads and then there was an abandoned car stuck in a 3 ft drift. Somebody had tried to get home to the village on the back road and got stuck there too. It took a local farmer to clear the drifts off the main road with his farm equipment, but that took five days.

Thanks for this comment too Chris.

Thanks Chris. Much appreciated.

Thank you Daniel. You are very kind and complementary.

Thanks for commenting on this image. It is one of my favourite recent ones.

Thank you. I had no idea that this was a POTD un til I got your message. I have been absent from Photo.net for several years and had forgotten that I had an account until this week's phishing scam. I deleted all the old work and started afresh with a few new images. This one was done using a copy stand on my dining-room floor. The background is a grey painted board and the boat is an overlay of Captain Scott's ship, the RRS Discovery.

Nice sharp photo of the horses, but it is a pity that the driver's face is hidden.

The images is well framed with space in front of the horses for them to be driven into.

I am undecided about the white tent. Yes it provides a neutral background colour, but the folds are a tiny bit distracting.

Did you arrange the stones like this, or did another artist?

A nice image!

Bird fills the frame well, and is in an interesting pose on the branch. Good catchlight in the eye. Background colour complements the colours of the bird, but perhaps is not very natural in appearance. (I would have preferred it to be a different colour, but this is nit-picking). The hanging seed pod is out of focus and I find this to be a slight distraction. Is it my imagination or is there a very slight halo around the bird, especially along it's back, as well as round the seed pod? This weakens the image for me somewhat.

 

Stan

Hi Jerilee

This has the makings of a great image. I love the eye contact which is pin sharp.

As with your other image you need to pay a little more attention to the background. Cameras deliver rectangular photos, but you don't need to stick with this. Try cropping to a square format and you'll lose the distracting highlight at top right and much of the ugly metal background at the left.

You'll lose a little of one of the girl's arms doing this, but I promise that the final image will be much stronger.

That's it! It will then be superb!

 

Stan

This wee fella is charming, as it is so difficult to get children of this age to stay happy and maintain eye contact for long. His (I assume that it is a "he") skin tones are soft and just as they ought to be. One to definitely keep in the family album.

However there is much that can be done to improve the image.

Firstly the background is rather distracting - particularly the bright yellow horizontal stripe and the yellow highlights in the trees in the distance. There is also a white "circle of confusion" (an out of focus flower perhaps) in the grass just to the top right of the baby's head. Choose a more uniform background perhaps, either darker or lighter than the child according to your taste. Remember that right coloured objects lead the eye away from the main subject.

The blanket (or whatever it is) that the baby is resting on is rather too light (burnt out) for me and has no texture detail. This is mainly a consequence of photographing a white object in fairly bright light. Choose slightly darker material or slightly underexpose or move the photography session into slightly heavier shade.

Try cropping slightly to (just) remove the blurred grass in front of the background and you'll have a much stronger image.

Yours

Stan