~ T ~
by KMcC

Comment:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

Quite a pleasant image to look at and definitely meets the challenge descrip. Interesting comp, I like that the girl is slightly out of focus and the sparklers nice and sharp. The colours seem a little odd, as noted already. Also, I have to join those who are left cold by the white vignette. It seems that vignette use is very hit and miss, and really doesn't seem to do well for fairly close shots like this as they come across as claustrophobic.

Otherwise a decent effort, I do hope you continue to keep entering.

Susan

Pink Kryptonite
by WonderDude

Comment:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

I recognized that type of lantern right away, someone in the area makes them! Nice trippy colours, the way they're designed certainly helps you meet the challenge, and if you look at it for awhile it looks like it starts to rotate (or maybe that's just me :-) So what if it is a teeny bit of an easy way to get an entry, sometimes stuff like this works, and even if you didn't win you still did pretty well.

Keep up the good work, I think we're going to be seeing more of you on the front page!

Susan

Great Horned Owl
by cdn1

Comment:
Cool, I've often seen Jim from CRC flying birds at various shows up here. Glad to see an owl without jesses, unless you cloned em out. Either way congrats on the red...as we Canucks know, red up here is first place, blue second :-)

The Unknown
by Phocal

Comment:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

Aw dang, a ribbon winner....always the toughest to critique as the vox populi have already spoken and voted. So will do my best. *looking for flaws*.....hmmmm....this could take awhile. *off to refill wineglass*

OK. Your comp is a little centred, but that happens a lot in images where the minimalistic approach rules, as it does here. I recognized the birds as cormorants because we have them here too though I don't think in the winter months. Nice gentle leading motion from left to right with a variety of scale in terms of the silhouettes. Nice that you have a perfectly calm surface to work with. A little surprised that you shot so fast, but who am I to argue? There is almost a natural level of vignetting happening too here, both above and below. You did a great job here, congrats on the ribbon and keep up the good work!

Susan

Sugar coated sunset
by Gudjonotto

Comment:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

Like many others I am wondering why this image didn't ribbon. Maybe Icelandic sunsets are now considered passe, along with macros of waterdrops and tigers swimming underwater?

Anyway I love this pic - the light is to die for, it's so subtle I can hardly believe it's a 30 second exposure. Composition is great with the high horizon as opposed to being dead-centre; great focus stacking, love the delicate rimefrost on the rocks and as was already noted, the 'pawprints' of frozen bubbles under the ice. Tiny bit of glare to the mid-right but hard to believe that that alone would knock you down.

Still, 24/126 isn't bad. All I can think is that most voters haven't lost their infatuation with heavily saturated colours. Next time blast the bejeezus out of the sunset/sunrise, and we'll probably see you ribbon again!

Susan

Katie, 4th of July 2014
by boocowski

Comment:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

This is a lovely image, it looks like it should be in a fashion magazine. Your cousin is lovely and the warm tones of her hair and skin offset the coolness of the bg perfectly. The fact that you can't see her eyes adds some mystique. If the sparkler had been doing its thing (those things are impossible to get going at times) this could have been on the front page.

Onto the technicals. Lighting is decent and although high ISOs are not Nikon's thing, the image isn't noisy. The vignette here looks more like an exposure matter than done in post. Composition is straightforward but for an image like this you don't need to get fancy. You just need to get it, and you did. Wish this image had scored higher but that's life here on DPC.

Hope this has been helpful, please continue shooting and entering!

Susan

Our Greatest Invention?
by sjohnston

Comment:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

Love the colours of the bright signs contrasting with the rust and evident wear on the bikes and pieces of all sorts. Good use of ambient light. Beware of long exposures when there is glass or any kind of reflective surface, though, because that will create a hotspot which is distracting.

You don't want needless distractions with a shot like this, that has a jumble of subjects to look at - all the bike parts and then the signs and window to the right - can get the eye going all over the place and leave the voter wondering what they're meant to be looking at. I would suggest cropping from the top edge of the windowframe, the part closest to you, and making a square crop of this image instead. Yes it does crop out part of the street sign saying Cleveland, but we can still read enough of the lettering to make it out.

Hope this helps,

Susan

Mon-arbre
by chloefr

Comment:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

Lovely twilight colours and good use of silhouette, I like that the figure on the right is somewhat blurry so we know that this isn't a static shot.

I don't want to sound like an ignorant North American, but titling your images in English might help a little. As I've said before my French is adequate, so I know it's 'My tree'. Not everyone else will get it, though. Perhaps a tighter crop because the tree here is huge but the human is vying for attention with the tree.

A suggestion: invest in a tripod. Unless you like shooting handheld with a needlessly high ISO, a tripod will be a godsend because you can frame the shot, have a lower ISO and use a longer exposure. Look at the work of photogs like Mark aka Cuttooth to see what this little investment can do for you.

Hope this helps

Susan

Message edited by author 2016-01-07 19:27:15.

Weathered
by WonderDude

Comment:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

I wish this image had done better in voting but there is no accounting for voters' tastes. That poor tree isn't weathered, though it was the weather (tornadoes) that did the damage. That tree had been stripped to its bones.

Basically the tree itself is fantastic, with all those broken limbs and strong lines everywhere. The lighting is great (overcast skies have some use after all). The focal point is clear, composition simple, focus is great looking at your settings, small wonder you're loving that setup you now have.The background buildings don't really detract...yes they are there, but they're not drawing attention away from the tree.

So why didn't this image do better, it didn't even get any comments during voting? Well, it is a safe image, there are no dark corners for us to probe and explore. A nighttime shot of this tree, perhaps with the moon caught in its branches, could have taken things an entirely different direction. Also, I think too many voters just simply saw the title and just didn't realize that this was a tree that had simply weathered quietly and died, but in fact had undergone some severe trauma in that death. It must've taken a lot of tornado power to rip the bark off of a tree!

Hope this helps, and please keep on entering - you clearly have an eye and some good gear to play with, so please make the most of both!

Susan

Norway Spruce macro
by d410

Comment:
na