Great contest, everyone! Some thoughts:
@goldmac2006 I had to download this to look at the whole composition; much more successful that way versus scrolling through it. Vertical wide-angle shots are often tricky; this one is successful with its forced perspective and vanishing point reinforced by the vertical bays. Spooky, too, or maybe a better word is uncanny
@Snowlover The classic layered landscape: foreground mounds of vegetation merge into the mountains, merge into the puffy cloudscape distant. Lower left stone “anchors” the picture and gives it a little diagonal dynamism too. FWIW I find the picture over-sharpened to my taste, and some of the foliage blacks (lower right) seem blocked up
@mtbdudex A tricky picture to evaluate or critique. The WOW is certainly here, the effort is appreciated; I would like to add this kind of picture to my own bucket list of images to make; so in this sense it’s a total winner. But OTOH I’m less enthused with regards to the house feeling somehow squashed in this perspective, and the red light remannts in the front could have added a light counterpoint to the spinning stars; but just feels like an unfocussed blob. So of course its a successful picture, but another version with a better foreground would let me focus on the real show, those spinning stars (yes I know they’re not spinning, we are … that tension is lovely)
@oblomow Is this a test for me: i.e., put up a Finnish picture and get yourself an automatic podium spot? I /do/ love Finnish landscapes, so yeah, not a bad strategy. Still, calm water, the nearly-featureless fells beyond, one copse of trees in the mid ground, the blown-out sky at far left contrasting with the deep blue reflected in the water at the far right — a successful picture no matter who is looking
@mollyc Like goldmac2006 ’s composition, we have the forced perspective, the bay system, the vanishing point but here coincident with that faint horizon (look at those delicate clouds dancing on it; such a contrast to the stark piers anchored into the sand). Also nice timing, waiting for the surf to retreat and leave that gleaming band of saturated sand reflecting the sky and creating a nicer boundary between sand and sea
@uacd Pleasantly low-tech. I like green overtone, water and sky, I like that the blacks are black, I like the dueling bright points: the moon and its reflection, some other man made light maybe at the end of a dock. The right side of the frame (its edges) is great; the left side has junk that distracts. Consider a tighter crop. Love that the stars somehow make an appearance too
@C0ncreteBl0nde I enjoy your photography in general but I’ll confess I don’t get this one. The Chevy and other marques logos are burned out, the neon or however the signs are lit feels pixelated; “Goss Motors” feels cut off or pushed too close to the edge of the frame; the copyright is also truncated (did this file upload correctly?) The colors are unpleasant to me. I almost always find text in a photo distracting; it automatically says to me that the semantics of the text is more important than any of the other formal aspects of the picture, so as I scan this, I’m thinking, why am I looking at the word Chevrolet, the acronym GMC, the franchise name GOSS MOTORS? and putting it all together I’m asking, why? What point am I missing? This picture doesn’t seem to aspire to be advertising, so I’m a little stumped
@piatigorsky Fun. The overwrought ceiling feels endless, the chandelier’s grandeur blunted by the endless ornament that this perspective offers. Love the two figures at the balcony edge, and the one white-haired centered figure; on the other hand, the peripheral people (open programs lower left, finding their seats on the right) are distorted enough to be distracting; the picture would be much more successful without them
@cjsuk A lovely landscape, and a yes to rendering it in black and white, as the tones of the sky are that much more interesting in this spot of water in the foreground. Love the receding islands center; love the mountain touching the upper left corner, framing the dramatic sky. Maybe the blacks could be blacker, but I get that this picture took the exposure right up to the edge of blocking up the blacks and losing detail; I guess I wonder how much of the middle ground detail adds to the picture given how much is in the foreground already
@AlixSPQR A pleasant path, and nice to see something shot for the context. I have always liked the reduced-palette early-spring shots; the greens are individual rather than one big layer
@richardallan The night sky again, vertical-stylez. Beautiful. I think what really makes this picture work for me is the selective lit-up foliage in the foreground: not overwhelming, but also saving the foreground from being just a dark blob. Maybe the left side is more successful than the right side, which appears to have some kind of built structure that takes me out of the picture, so to speak. BTW it is fascinating to me that the typical sky you see in the southern hemisphere isn’t the one I see in the northern hemisphere, and even if one isn’t much of an astronomer someone still senses that the sky is totally different that what one is used to
@OldMacs4Me I like mostly-sky compositions, especially when there’s drama: it looks like the weather is changing, maybe the heavy clouds at left are pushing the wispy sky at right away. As with the other black and white entry, the limited palette helps us concentrate on the dramatic forms in the sky
@arkitect Oooh, that’s it. The lone tree early to be bare, the saturated-green fields reveal it’s been a wet fall (do you have any other kind there?) and we have such a pleasant dark-to-light progression in the sky from left to right. A “filled” left side, with darks, contrasts with the more empty, and lighter, right side. The curving path pulls us left, while the bright distant hills pull us to the to the center right. The texture-gradient is also successful: detailed in the foreground, but not featureless in the distance (right side) and stamped by the tree (left side) Great stuff
@kendallm It is a gift in New York to have a dry spot out of the train. Photo of a photographer is interesting too; I'm quite partial to candids
@iPhone-Guy I like the tension between the sloping ground and the bare trunks sloping uphill; combined with the wide angle it feels pleasantly topsy-turvy. The simple palette of a late fall landscape certainly helps with this reading too. My only quibble is the framing; maybe the left side is a little clumpy; I want that diagonal trunk (fallen? just a branch?) to travel cleanly off the left side
@someoldguy I like the simple tripartite composition, the half-and-half horizon division. The textures of the foreground, receding, pull our eyes towards the end of this valley and up to the clouds beyond. I’m not usually a fan of cloning, but I’d consider taking out a few of the black rocks in the midfield
I could put easily half or more of these on the podium. That being said, I landed on:
3rd
@cjsuk and
@mollyc
2nd
@richardallan and
@oblomow
1st
@arkitect
