richard_cooper5

I like this a lot, especially if the print has the luminous quality I see on my screen. Might consider a different title, though. This is not pond scum. It's the photographic equivalent of a semi-abstract painting. Setting viewers to thinking about where the image opriginated detracts from the effect, and it devalues what you accomplished -- reduces it to mere cleverness. It's what you made, not what you made it from that counts.

The circumtances that gave rise to this photograph are horrific, but the measure of how good this image is lies in the fact that you didn't need to know them. The same is true of the other pictures in Bill Wingell's portfolio. He has a gift for showing human feelings so that you don't need to be told the story; you get it. He knows how close to get and never gets closer. He does not substitute images that 'might be' for ones that 'are' -- not every creased and weathered face carries wisdom, not every pretty face has lights inside it. And the older, black and white images are a nice reminder of the historical debt that most of us who photographs people owe to the Leica; in a certain way, it's where all the ladders start.

This may be the hardest kind of image to get in hockey: dramatic action away from the nets. Almost impossible to anticipate, gone in an instant, under difficult light, with no control over background or anything else. You caught a part of the game seldom seen in photographs as good as this one except in NHL arenas with prepositioned strobes. You even managed what to me is pleasing composition.

Color and balance of composition are pleasing, but what I like most about this picture is that it doesn't just capture the two birds but suggests a relationship between them. You can almost hear the conversation.

Teru, this must have been a stunning sight and it hardly seems fair to critique what someone did jumping off a bus. But is this a case of trying to capture everything when going for a piece of it might have yielded a stronger picture? The terraces are a striking element. So is the yak. And the blue mountain valley funneling down so precipitously is a third. A full frame of the mountains rising above with the yak small at the bottom might have worked well. Or the yak isolated in the plain of interlocking terraces. Still, the picture you got is so exotic it will stay in the mind.