Shimmer
by naomik

Comment:
Congratulations on the red for an outstanding dark and moody portrait.

Elegance
by peecee

Comment:
Congratulations on your first and well deserved blue ribbon! Great low key still life.

Message edited by author 2006-03-29 09:29:43.

Winter Wonderland
by ShutterPug

Comment:
Congratulations on breaking the "7" barrier and finishing 5th. Higher scores are getting more difficult to achieve. Yours is one of my personal top three for this challenge. It is a great image in every way.

Reflection
by UNTITLED

Comment:
Wonder how this image would score if it were flipped 180 degrees.

Simon Benson Built a Bridge
by f-32

Comment:
They say you learn something new every day.

Although I am a born and bred Oregonian originally from Salem I have never heard of turn-of-the-20th-century lumbering pioneer and philanthropist Simon Benson, who built the landmark Benson Hotel in downtown Portland, before seeing this picture. I see he funded this well know reinforced concrete bridge at Multnomah Falls as well as the one at Wahkeena Falls. He also single handedly purchased all the bonds for construction of the beautiful Columbia River Highway through the Gorge when they were not selling. That is one of the most scenic roadways in America. He also was responsible for Portland's well known brass drinking fountains and did so much for Oregon and its lumbering industry. He was quite the self made man! Thanks for the history lesson.

Btw, nice picture, good composition and not your ordinary view of the falls.

The Crossing
by rayg544

Comment:
Reminds me of the Buena Vista ferry crossing of the Willamette River south of Monmouth, Oregon USA.

maria pia
by charliev

Comment:
Has good detail in the shadows. You might want to try converting it to black and white. You may like it better.

Predator
by gotrond

Comment:
Image has a lot of black but not very much detail in the dark areas. Having detail in the shadows it what sets low-key apart from other types of photography. It might be interesting to see how the composition is changed if you do nothing more than center the eye on one of the rule of thirds intersection points.

a broken bird
by ralton

Comment:
Good profile composition. Nice shallow depth of field that produces a good soft background. Most of the detail in this image is in the shadows so it meets the challenge well. However, that probably is not apparent to most voters who don't understand about that sort of thing.

I suspect it will get a pretty low score but it is actually a quite good picture with a couple adjustments. Make these three small changes and I think it would have scored much higher:
1-Converted to greyscale
2-Used "Levels" to reduce the brightest white slightly to make it seem more low-key to voters
3-Sharpened it

Hope you don't mind, but I took the liberty to do that so I could show you the result. It is here:
Your adjusted image in my temporary PBase gallery

watcher at the gate
by yeti

Comment:
This image is tough to judge. It does not have any overexposed areas but is in color and does not fit the classic mode of low-key imagery. It looks like there is some color noise in places that should be corrected. There is not a lot of strength to the composition and that will hurt it. Viewers may find the branch shadows to be distracting because they will not be able to discern why they were included in the composition. Though voters will understand the connection between the flag and border it appears that it is not uniform in width all the way around.