Pepper Sunlightby
oOWonderBreadOoComment by oOWonderBreadOo: From a thread- just want to keep it w/ the image...
The image is, first of all, not NEARLY as textural as you'd want it to be for this topic. It's luminous, but it doesn't really say "texture" to me. Compositionally, it's divided vertically into an in-focus and an our-of-focus section more or less precisely on the vertical bisector of the image; that's a very static composition. Fully half your image is out of focus, but it's unfortunately rendering the same VALUE as the in-focus part (the leaves are lit the same), so it looks vaguely like sloppy work.
Try making a selection of the in-focus leaf, invert the selection, and use levels to tone down everything but that leaf; I bet you'll find that a distinct improvement. I realize that wouldn't have been legal in this challenge, btw, but try it and watch what happens.
Finally, the way the left arc of the subject leaf is truncated by the left edge of the image doesn't feel right to me, especially inasmuch as there's (as I mentioned) fully half the image out of focus on the right, an area that could easily have been eliminated to osme degree by panning the camera left on the subject leaf, so the ratio was more like 2/3, 1/3.
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