The Dreamby
flip89Comment: Hi Ken and
Greetings from the Critique Club
Before digging in to this image, I went to review your portfolio - I'm very impressed with your skills; you do a great job on the "Chicago" theme. I especially liked "The Race" - it's perfect. And I predicted "Bowls" would ribbon - glad it did because it's a superb image.
The Dream is a real departure from your usual style - but is very effective. It obviously took a lot of post procesing - which for the most part was well done. There are still remnants of color in the sky area, a building and cars - as some have already mentioned. You may want to search the forums as there are a couple good threads on different methods of desat. For example - you could select the channels other than red - and convert to grayscale - leaving just the red.
The soft focus along with the hectic traffic make the picture appear dreamy or surreal. And, your title is simple, effective and drives home the point.
The lady in red is a perfect anchor point and adds loads of interest. You wonder, "Will she make it?" or "What if the lights turn green?" She may be better if her suit were a bit brighter.
Finally, I'm impressed with the traffic light system. It really is a dream that all the lights were red at the same time. Perhaps they have a way of doing that for emergency vehicles, or you just have perfect timing! Red from here to infinity.
I note that the image size is under half of that allowed. I don't see any obvious compressin problems though - so I assume it didn't need much space with mostly greyscale pixels.
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