As the Creaky Door Closes
by dsterner

Comment:
love the lighting and the tones and colors - one of the best of the challenge.

Faded Beauty
by NikonJeb

Comment:
Jeb- A nice image - I gave it a 7 during voting.

The things I liked about the image was the richness of the fading rose - well illuminated, good textures, warm yet melancholy.

The reason it likely did not do better in voting is that the while there is a smooth background, the background does not have a large impact on the image. Having the background very muted tones of dark green did not give the fast voters enough eye candy to stick around and look. In addition, much of the background is quite dark without a lot of the 'little circles of light' that so many were expecting.

Evening Light at Summer's End
by Bear_Music

Comment:
Robert - I really liked this one a lot - the softness and smoothness of the background really accentuated the flower. The one thing I noticed was some apparent artifacts from the HDR on the black eye of the flower - as if there are some unexpected magenta areas along the rim of the 'eye'

Rhapsody
by noraneko

Comment:
Cat - Excellent job on this one - gave it a 9 during voting. As I said during voting, simply beautiful!

Lovers
by zxaar

Comment:
Arjun - Very good job - loved this one during the challenge and the title really fits.

Close of Day
by sibeling

Comment:
fantastic lighting - very well composed and executed

Fire in the Sky
by SJCarter

Comment:
the sky is nice and smooth but the ground seems a bit oversharpened

Looking down
by FocusPoint

Comment:
Congrats on the Red! Really beautiful image - well deserved.

Spinning Her Web
by Ann

Comment:
Congrats on the Blue! I am so happy this won - this entry really seemed to separate itself from a really strong field of entries.

Welcome to Frog Heaven
by BrianR

Comment:
good sharp image - but there are several areas that don't quite work in my opinion.

first, there is too much clutter - why is a gingerbread man in the photo? what is the brown stuff in the background? DPC photographs usually work better when the image is simpler - less stuff means better scores

second, the background creates lighting issues - a dark background like this really makes the image seem underexposed.

Third, a recrop of the image to focus only on the frog candy would really boost the shot. the candies are pretty good and well photographed - take advantage of that...