endof_days

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.

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.

Yes, yes it is. All of your photos should look precisely like this.

That is the effect one gets when pasting in an element from another image, poorly.

I'm not in any way against surrealism or fantasy. Many of Ron's images including some of the wildlife images are obviously digital manipulations, some are done very nicely, others like this one, not so much. Although it apparently does not bother others who have commented, I cannot get paste the banding and posterizing going on in the sky and water.

The image feels like a Photoshop contrivance and a poorly executed one at that. The sharpness and hard contrast of the boat clash with the heavy Gaussian blur laid on top of the background. They feel like other worlds, other photos. The background also suffers from a lot of weird posterization from the pixels being pushed about too much. I assume the intention is to be soothing but I find it disjointed and jarring.

This is a well done rendering of a popular type of portraiture of captive zoo animals. I see a lot of these images on the internet, often the subjects are primates or large African animals, lions and such.

I am left with the same sense of unease from these stylized photos, as I am when looking at those Draganized images of street people, which are also quite popular.

Technically strong but not my cup of tea.

Why so much negative space on the right when the figure is heading out of frame to the left?
The capture of the dancer is quite nice.

Echoes of former selves.

I'm sure you suffer from none of the above while I perhaps have been inarticulate, I'll try to elaborate. My feeling is that the image is too sharp from front to back not that it lacks sharpness. When one wants to give a photo a sense of depth the use of light and sharpness or depth of field are significant tools. If the image had been shot in such a way as to accent the depth, either by the lighting and/or by employing a narrower depth of field, the end result would, in my opinion, be an image with a greater sense of depth. As stands the photo looks flat to me.

A solid black background would make the image flatter and even more static but would have no effect on my opinion of the crop.

The front to back sharpness of the blossom has it feeling somewhat static, in fact the overall sharpness from front to back doesn't work for me. What is the focal point? Is it the background?, the bud? or the bloom? If the three elements had three differing degrees of sharpness the image would have some flow and depth. I like the angle of the flower and bud and their presentation, I do however find the crop bottom and right too tight. Nice job retaining the highlights one a white bloom.