Just an observation from someone who may be clueless...
I do think the thread swung a bit into another realm, and for those who aren't either doing modifications to show their pp concepts or have a photo they want others to do post-processing experimentation, I think these people might feel they are slightly out of the loop, or are themselves actually off topic by just posting a shot... sometimes the conversation becomes limited to one or two original photos which are all being experimented on by others - kind of like the old thread where someone would offer RAW files for others to practice their HD magic on. We saw all kinds of variation on a few pics, but not a lot of original pics were submitted. I'd hazard a guess that the two types of threads, while both interesting, are quite different - thus contributions are down.
As I said, it's just an observation, and I could be very wrong here... (clueless??

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BTW: I like the idea of this kind of thread, and want to encourage you guys to keep up with it. It's just that I do think the original concept gets lost, so maybe split it up into separate threads... or not..