Flames of Passion
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Comment by whiteroom:
i like red

Flames of Passion
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Comment by GoodEnd:
Very interesting and beautiful composition.

Bee and flower 27 Jan.JPG
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Comment by Jutilda:
I like this. Just ran across it. The be is posed like "I'm King of the Hill." LOL

Natures Beauty
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Comment by hopper:
Greetings from the Critique Club ...

This is excellent! Everything's in sharp focus (except for just a tiny bit on top), the colors are great, the rose is perfect. It's fit's the challenge nicely. There's not a lot of contrast, but it's not needed - the softness is very nice.

The Composition is good, but I think it would be a bit better if the center of the flower was right dead on an intersection of thirds. In my opinion, here at dpc, it's hard to predict how a flower shot is going to do. Sometimes people just like 'em, other times - not so much.

Still, this is excellent. Well done.

milo

Natures Beauty
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Comment by persimon:
Beautiful softness. Love the details and the textures, the beautiful lighting and tones.

Natures Beauty
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Comment by pellemannen:
I would have liked it better if it was centered

Natures Beauty
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Comment by hotpasta:
great shot...would look great as a print with a black matte......hope this does well for you

Shearing Dante The Alpaca
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Comment by awpollard:
Greeting from the Critique Club...

Nice approach to providing the viewer with one of the necessities in life that we don't always see. I believe you are using Dante as the subject and not the shearers due to the crop that you have presented us.

Given the situation that you mentioned in your description the lighting and detail is quite nice. The story you are telling doesn't appear to bad a sad one as Dante does not appear to be fussing about.

In general I would have liked to see just a little (just a tad) more of the hands on right and a lot less of the gentlemen on the left. The amount of white from the gentlemans tee-shirt adds an uneven balance to the natural colors that otherwise fill the frame.

As always, when doing a critique, I will download the shot and while perserving what the shooter originally intended, try different things that I might have done and/or to back my observations.

To ease out some of the white on the left of the frame, I tried a 6x4 crop starting just below the stain on the gentleman's sleeve. For me this accomplished several things, the most obvious being a lot less of the white tee shirt, the stain on the sleeve a small but evidant distraction, the dark area (gentleman's black pants) all but removed from the frame and finally places the subjects eye on the bottom left third of the frame.

The only other thing that I might have done, would be to do a tad bit of Dodging of the eye and just below the nose to bring out Dante's expression a bit.

As to sharpness I will always say a bit more sharpness but realize that softness comes a lot of the time from resizing the image. When submit to challenges my last step after the resize is to sharpen one final time.

A very nice shot, highly fitting of the challenge. Great job.

Andy

ED: to note a strange coincidence... Today (after critiquing this in the morning) I went down to Old Town San Diego to shoot the Mormon Infantry celebration... Long story short they had an Alpaca there that was trimmed up nicely as the one you have in this shot. Not to common a a sight in San Diego...

Message edited by author 2006-02-25 20:35:50.

Natures Beauty
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Comment by slgardner:
Beautiful coloring and clarity.

Natures Beauty
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Comment by sherpet:
Soft and delicate.....