Look For The Bright Side Of Life
by docpjv

Comment:
I don't see how this image in ANY way "emotional" portrays the bright side of life, but it sure as hell does it graphically. The skull highlight on the left is to die for. I wish more people paid this kind of attention to the "dark sides" of their images, instead of just letting the subject bleed off into the background.

Mechanical lock gates
by geewhy

Comment:
I'm really pleased to see this image win. It SO stood out from most of the others for its much more meditative approach to the challenge. It tells a "mechanical" story very well, and adds a purity of composition
and tonality that makes it stand out as a "pure" photograph. Well done!

Robt.

Long and Winding Road
by Tranquil

Comment:
Beautifully murky, nicely sly waldo-figurtes in the shadows middle, had to look hard to dind them. Image itself is a tad too contrasty, I sish the shadows werent quite so blocked. Solid entry.

"One Week Pardner"
by JPR

Comment:
Compositionally striking. A dark, moody image, vaguely sinister or foreboding. The cigarette makes the photo. I wish there were better separation between watch cap and background, and that the bright square in top center were burned down a zone and a half or maybe eliminated. Eyetraps are death on candids.

Hnaging out...
by Gordon

Comment:
In my personal view, this is less a candid than it is a sports/action photo. The action is good; if the technical details were better I'd have rated it a bit higher, but the subjects are hard to "read" properly. A selection mask and some levels adjustment on the 2 sailors would work wonders for this shot. San Francisco bay?

Road goes on FOREVER
by msdoubletrouble

Comment:
This is not a "candid" by my definition, lacking any live subject.

Tom
by xtabintun

Comment:
It's a marvelous facial expression. I'd have scored this higher if it had a fuller tonal range and were not so static in composition.

Innocent Soul
by TLL061

Comment:
For me, personally, this ismply is not a candid shot. Candid requires "life" to meet its goal. I fon't think any photograph of an inanimate subject may be called candid.

Flight 1405, 8:28 PM
by hsteg

Comment:
I have mixed feelings about this image. At some levels it works very well, but it's ultimately not especially satisfying to me. The blurriness of the page turning is a plus, not a negative, incidentally.

In The Pink!
by autool

Comment:
The post-processing to B/W in the surround is so evident here that it made the photo feel less candid to me. Incidentally, in doing such selective desaturation, pay carefull ateention to the transitions. sme grass to her left and udner the unbrella is still green, and this hurts.

Even had this been all color or all B/W, it is less succesful than many as a candid to me because there's no real emotional content; hands and faces carry most of the weight for that, and neither is evifdent in this image. This is a personal aesthetic bias; others may disagree.