endof_days

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

"The blue boat seems almost suspended above the water." 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.