Tribute to O.Henry
by lei_73

Comment:
Kings, check. Cabbage, check. Composition, workmanlike. Technicals, adequate: the lighting is decent if uninspired, the choice of shallow DOF is interesting.

Does it fit the book (which is a collection of short stories, not a novel)? Not really, except for the obvious one-on-one match with the title. But see, the thing of it is that the TITLE has nothing to do with the book either; it's a quote from Lewis Carroll ("The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things: / Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax, of cabbages and kings...") that highlights the miscellaneous nature of the book itself.

Heck, what am I saying? It's clean, if unimaginative, but it doesn't especially float my boat. I'll give it a 5.

The Postman Always Rings Twice
by LinMalAng

Comment:
As far as meeting the challenge, well... you have a postman and he's ringing a doorbell, and this illustrates the title, so you have that nailed pretty tight I guess, although the title of the book, in the real world, is a complete non-sequitur. That is to say, nowhere in the book is there a postman, and nowhere does he ring twice, or ring at all for that matter :-)

The book's not ABOUT that, see? It's an early, and notorious, modern crime novel, having to do with a wife and a drifter conspiring to kill her husband. So there's a dilemma, huh? One that's troubling me in all this voting, truth be known. If you made an image faithful to the BOOK, the voters would say "WTF does this murder-in-the-bathtub have to do with a Postman?" and you'd get hammered. But you make an image that matches the title, people can understand that, but people like me who've read the book get a little peeved and...

You get the picture :-) I'm trying to rise above that...

As to the merits of the image, I'd be a lot happier if you'd coaxed some detail and structure out of the face. I like the light on his glasses though...

5 from me.

Sundeck for dreamers
by Neat

Comment:
Looks neat to me...

Arabesque
by Melethia

Comment:
Look who's on a roll lately! "Arabesque" was the name of my last sailboat, BTW :-)

The Snows of Kilimanjaro, by Ernest Hemingway
by hahn23

Comment:
As reflected in a Rocky Mountain lake :-) It's a very beautiful scene, and it benefits from the clean, understated processing. I'm not completely wowed by it, but I appreciate a good landscape shot, and I'm slotting it in my 7 group for now, pending later revision as I see more images.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by nam

Comment:
What's nice about this, is that it actually feels like it's a reasonable period piece, faithful to the time in which Joyce wrote the book. The eyes are terrific, the ears weighted down by the hat, the upthrust chin: there's a bit of bewildered, a bit of apprehension, a bit of resistance all speaking here.

The eyes aren't quite as sharp as the nose and lips, and I'd like them to be tack sharp. The skin color seems a little cool to me. But allin all, a very nice entry. 7 from me.

you have left a part of your heart, of your blood, of your soul, in those pavements - Les Misérables
by Epsi

Comment:
A striking image. Very powerful. The connection to Les Mis is tenuous for me, but I'm taking things perhaps more literally than ought to be doing, and I'll acknowledge that at a metaphorical level you're it's working hard.

8 from me

A Bend in the River
by moondog

Comment:
I want to like this one so much more than I actually do :-( What's NOT to like? A curving stream, some shorebirds, an interesting tree... The elements are here. The composition's decent. But the processing isn't doing this justice; you've used tone mapping to flatten the scene very unnaturally, and it's also feeling very "crunchy" as a result of too much added structure or local-area contrast.

But, beyond technical issues, there's nothing much in this image to serve as a focal point around which it can organize. That's not always a serious flaw, but the issue here is that there are so MANY details that we need at least ONE aspect of it to stand out and take control. If, for example, one of the birds were wading in the nearer foreground, that might help a lot.

5 from me

Lord of the flies
by nygold

Comment:
This works rather well with the novel :-) The expression of the central boy's not entirely convincing, but the unexpected face in the lower left is priceless. I like the matter-of-fact processing and the artless composition. By "artless", I mean that it doesn't seem forced or unnatural or contrived, it feels spontaneous.

Very nicely done, 8 from me.

"North and South," by John Jakes
by ShaneBlake

Comment:
There's a lot to like in this image, as far as lighting and processing, though to my eyes you've tone-mapped it a little too flat. But the thing of it is, what's not working as well for me here is that every face is obscured, not visible. I know there's not much you could do about it (sure don't want to stand in FRONT of these event) but the bottom line is, it's all so STATIC: a hint of emotion in the faces would have helped that.

A 5 from me.