endof_days

The tattoo feels like the star of the show and the girl seems secondary.

Languid in a cloying fashion. The sort of thing I would like to look at printed big in my dentist's office, while waiting for a root canal.

The left and right side of the frame are at odds with each other and furthermore I do not see that the submerged bush and dark corner of sky add anything, therefore I've gone ahead and done the unthinkable.

I find the lightning and sky interesting in a documentary fashion. The town below the mountains doesn't seem like anything special and does not hold any interest. Cropping the image at the base of the mountains, just above the distracting bright lights, gives a more satisfy photo of the sky, which is where all of the drama is unfolding.

The first thing to strike me, even before the over the top HDR, is the focus being set to the buildings in the far back of the scene. This seems an odd choice with such a large portion of the foreground occupying the frame. There are lots of ways to make an image work with a soft foreground however in this image it serves no purpose and feels like an oversight rather than an artistic choice. In the larger version the full extent of how far wrong the processing has gone on the foreground really jumps out. For that much posterization and noise to occur I'm guessing that the foreground was grossly underexposed and dragged kicking and screaming out of the darkness. If the drab and out of focus flowers were cropped out, then you would have something closer to the typical hallucinatory postcard pic, which I assume was the goal here.

I cannot decide which is more garish, the photo or the subject. Aside from a somewhat claustrophobic composition the technical aspects are well handled. The end result however comes across to me as cloying, contrived and lacking any nuance. The lighting has a sort of 'deer in the headlights' feel that could have worked with another subject, for a flower it feels too full frontal. I'm having trouble trying to figure out where the photographer was trying to go with this set up. There is a clinically sterile look to the image which if intended is successful. Personally I tend to think of flowers as sensual and romantic, something which this rendering certainly is not.

Magritte meets Escher meets Dali. As a construction it is visually entertaining much like the work of the painters it emulates. I enjoy the cleverness but don't take much else away. One thing which to my mind sets it apart from the other recent composite potw selections is that it is done well with an advanced level of skill and attention to detail. Some of the other recent selections have felt slapped together with dimensions wrong, shadows making no sense and other obvious signs of the pieces being pasted together. I agree with Robin in as much as this does seem more in the realm of painting than photography, not that I think that should necessarily preclude it being chosen for potw.

While a tripod and rail are useful for focus stacking macro shots, the use of one is by no means a necessity. The PN photographer Line Martel does very detailed insect macro work using focus stacking, which she has mentioned is often done hand held. PS pretty much automates the process if you import the images as layers in a single file. First select all layers and then click on auto align from the 'edit' drop down menu. Once the layers are aligned choose auto blend layers from the edit menu and PS will create masks to only allow the sharp portions of each layer to be visible. The masks often need to be tidied up as the software makes slight errors. There are loads of tutorials on the subject. Don't shy away because of the tripod issue. In this image I do find focus issues detracting. The bug itself is not in focus, the point of focus being the inside end of the petal to its left. Those out of focus petals front and center, pull my eye away from the bug which is small to start with. I think the singular nature of the oof petals is what makes them distracting. If more of those foreground petals were to be as soft, or if the entire foreground where much softer focused overall, I think the attention would fall back onto the bug. This of course is a solution which could have been done in post with no need for stacking. Another option beyond getting the focus on the subject could have been to stop down the lens and slow the shutter or raise the ISO. I also think that some dodging and burning to make the bug a bit brighter and the sun drenched foreground petals a bit darker would help to focus attention on the bug. I also suspect that a bit more detail could have been teased out of the shadows, as stands a lot of the image is empty black space. I like the feel of the shot, it wants to be dramatic but I'm too distracted by technical issues to become truly engaged.

Yes Michael and I was simply pointing out that what you had suggested was impossible without access to a time machine.

The image which Michael claims should have been chosen by the Elves was not even posted to Janine's page when the potw selection above was posted earlier this week. The image Michael linked to looks over-processed with a heavy hand. Earlier in the week, out of curiosity and after reading Lex's comment, I made an attempt at opening up the shadow under the plane and increasing detail so I know that it can be done subtly while still being effective. The image as posted as potw is perfectly acceptable as an example of seeing an interesting event unfolding, pointing a camera at it and pressing the shutter. As a news photo it succeeds. Trying to make anything more of it becomes problematic.

Bill, that I was not surprised was due to the fact that you seem to often take away something other than what I hoped to convey in so many of our exchanges and not because of some ulterior intention to insult you. I am happy to own a good measure of that failure to communicate. When I write a response to one of your comments and think that my response is as clear as window glass your response indicates that you received it as clear as mud.

"I guess it's easier to tell people what should be done, that showing them how it should be done." That's a pretty rich comment coming from someone who has made 3 comments on members photos at PN in the last 6 years.

Bill, unfortunate but not entirely surprising, that you would find my bridge analogy ridiculous. Going with Tony's music example, when I first started listening to classical music I loved Bach but did not care much for Mozart. As I familiarized myself with classical music I gained a better understanding into why I loved Bach and why Mozart left me flat. Developing a more studied understanding did not necessarily change my initial predilections but I did develop a greater understanding and respect. A richer understanding leads to a richer experience.

If I like something as an unstudied person that a studied person doesn't like, does it mean I am wrong to like it or that my opinion about it is any less valuable? A studied opinion on anything is of more value than an unstudied opinion. If I want to have a bridge built should I hire a guy with a degree in engineering or a guy who likes looking at bridges but does not know anything about bridges?

People can and often do have meaningful discussions around good photography. If recent discussions around the flawed and mediocre photography selected in this forum are any indication, choosing such images clearly does not foster either lively or illuminating discussion.

The scene itself is not without its charms. The composition is solid if a little busy. I'm not convinced that the heavy texture added to the sky contributes anything. As has been mentioned, the over-sharpening give the scene an unnatural feel. Another unnatural look which strikes immediately upon viewing is the inexplicable darkness on the roof and chimneys of the building and the blackness of the upper portion of the upright foreground tree. When I checked the color version of this image located in the same folder, my suspicions were confirmed. It appears that a gradient was pulled down on the image from the top to darken the sky. While the dark sky works fine, a mask should have been used on the building and tree to avoid the odd result of both being unnaturally blackened. Overall a nice image which could have been nicer with more prudent post production.

Bill, in your example of a photo contest the line will be clearly defined and clearly explained, that is not the same thing as your line, which by your own admission you cannot define and which is subjective. The act of photographing something removes it from reality. Reality is filtered through the media and winds up an interpretation of reality. Simply by choosing a composition and exposure and clicking the shutter you have made conscious decisions which alter the rendering of the scene. If you created the image using photographic processes it would seem reasonable to call the end result photography in much the same way as using brushes and paint on a substrate to create an image is referred to as painting. There are myriad styles of painting from hyper-realism to abstract but they are all still paintings. People have been compositing images together since the first cameras and prints. As soon as artists are presented with a medium they will start pushing the boundaries.

If one has a line, but the line is subjective and cannot be defined, the practical application of such a line is limited.

"Wouldn't it have been possible for the red treetops to have been added in postprocessing to an image originally created by vertical panning? " Yes.

My mom likes it and put it on the fridge and a bunch of people on some websites liked it. I can now safely ignore any constructive criticism I receive and resist any urges to improve my work. I've arrived at the top of the heap and there is nothing to do now but bask in the neon glow of my interweb accolades.

With the apocalyptic white glare of the background and the street fading into the distance, this seems like more of an exodus than a search. Perhaps the Lord's son also moves in mysterious ways.

The image is a composite, as you cannot pan vertically and have those tree tops sharp. I suppose the vertical pan could have been done in pp with the treetops masked but I do not think so. All of the treetops are in fact the same treetop. It has been resized, trimmed and flipped horizontally to appear, at a casual glance, to be different. If you look at the one in the upper left corner you can see where it is pasted over the background. You can see through it to the background layer. Perhaps the background was duplicated and put both above and below the treetops as they seem in some places to be in front and in others behind. All of this aside, it clearly looks like something that has been pasted together. I suspect that I might have liked the background image.