Quebec City
by darix

Comment:
Very very nearly ... but that foreground-most section of wall is just too intrusive, without really adding much in drama or visual interest for me. Shot from that touch closer, using the steel rrail as your leading line, I could see this scoring fabulously well. Great exposure, details, light, subject.

the village by night
by Andelain

Comment:
All that negative space ... photogrphaically intersting to me, certainly, but ... I think this challenge demands a shot to be more orthodixly interesting. Cries out for something to be happening there, and whilst I rather like the tonality, I don't think I would publish it if I were putting a guide together.

Iceland biggest church, Hallgrimskirkja
by JohannesFrank

Comment:
Forbidding. Don't like the halo-ing effect around the top of the thing - if it's from burning or selection I'd have found a gentler feathering of it less 'processed'. Good textures lower down, composition fine. Too heavyweight for this challenge? We'll see what folks think - I suspect they're looking for stuff more like advertising than documentary.

Rodeo
by kennyt

Comment:
Lacking drama in the light - just overall too bright a shot for me. Levels, or curves work to bring the contrast out in the scene more strongly would have made it so much more appealling - and possibly helped with that odd greenish cast in the sky.

Dinner in the Oregon District - Dayton, Ohio
by stupidcat

Comment:
Aligning just one side of the window givves the image a weird falling-over feel. A little distortion correction would have fixed that, and it would be worth fixing i think because otherwise I like the shot: good tonality, sense of compositional balance, although I do wish those characters were better framed by the window. Even like the crop on the car - enough of it to know it, and not slvishly including it siply because it's a thing. But that slight sense of giddiness from the curvature undermines the image a little all the time.

Riverside
by computerking

Comment:
The sheer level of contrast prevents this from working for me - so much bright, so much dark, and I would imagine the interesting stuff - the texture of the bark of that tree, the patterning and tones of green in the far bank - happens in a very restricted middle ground. Besides that, htere doesn't seem to be much very striking about the scene anyway - no special moment of light, unusualness of location. There's a hint, in the very left of frame, that the grss beside the lake/riveer and the dappling of the sunlight through brances might make a good image, but whether you could have made that fit the challenge, I don't know. But for all those points, I think you're not far off here: wait for the light, try to control the exposure in the sky - perhaps some fill flash to give detail in the shadows? - and perhaps, compositionally, just allow a little more foreground, and i think you'd have a very restful photograph.

Through the Trees
by charmayne

Comment:
Great shame about the sky here - would really like to see that kept more under control, especially as you've done such a good job with the tonality in the rest of the image. Is there fill-flash here? There's a slight cut-out feel to the foreground trees that hints at that, and it's very well controlled if it is. I'd personally have underexposed - or rather exposed for the sky, and tried to bring back the trees and grass using curves or levels; failing that, an obvious situation for a graduated ND filter. Thatweird sky loses you a couple of points, i fear.

Osteospurmum
by paynekj

Comment:
What looks like partial de-saturation seems a bit odd here - I'm not convinced that there's enough textural detail to warrant muting the colour information to this exent. It may of course be simply the way things are, and not processing, but then I think the point that it seems that way is still valid. The barrel distortion is a pity, but not major.

Nature's beauty, framed.
by ScantyNebula

Comment:
Those very strong halos from, presumably, heavy sharpening - or at least processing of some sort - actually brings a likeable effect to this. Like the graphical nature of the composition with those window-lights, and your use of colour. 6

Framed by leaves
by pixar

Comment:
The lack of depth of field definition somehow removes the affect of framing from this - the difference in scale is not enough to really suggest a foreground element and a background; that, and the sheer amount of greenery. Tonally, it's pretty good - accurate rendition of shades, even the grey of the water. There's a bizarre quality of over-compression, yet without the halo-ing effect one would associate with sharpening normally. Very pixelated looking. That gives a quite likeable grainy feel to it, were the subject a touch more suited to that kind of feel: this pleasant natural scene doesn't, to my eye, benefit much from it.