Tetelestai!by
JamesKWComment by Artifacts: Positives:
Well constructed image. The strength of the composition is in the detailed clouds and bright highlighting behind the main subject.
Technicals:
Nice use of silhouette, background highlighting and the rule of thirds in a clean and simple composition.
You don't say, but it looks like you used the burn tool on a data layer to darked the image edges. If so, you may have overdone it slightly making the darked areas look a tad bit unnatural with a brownish color cast typical from using the burn tool.
Even though the image was shot at f/14 it still looks as though it was focused at infinity on the sky background, which is nice and sharp, but left some softness in the main subject.
Though the silhouette is soft focused in places it appears haloed on the hands and has some digital "jaggies" on the cross edges in a few places which is typical of oversharpening. Looks like the sharpen tool may have been used for selective sharpening.
The Challenge:
This image has a very unusual double winged vote distribution curve. You have a jump in votes at both ends of the scale, yet not a single "1" vote. That usually indicates a highly controversial image but it IS a religion challenge. This is pure speculation but perhaps a display of The Crucifiction generates strong emotions both ways.
40th out of 302 is a very good placing with a 5.9 score. That means in general voters felt this is a very good image. The strong background highlighting effect likely played a roll in that.
Suggestions:
If, in fact, you used the burn tool for background darkening then I have an alternative suggestion that you might want to try. It will reduce or eliminate the brownish hue. It is a bit more work but is non-destructive and gives a more natural result...
Add a new layer and make it an "overlay" layer and click the 50% grey box. You can paint with white and black to perform dodge and burn but without using the actual dodge and burn tools themselves, just the paint brush.
To burn, like for darkening the clouds, you select black for the brush tool and set the mode to "darken" and opacity around 10%. When painting on the 50% layer this combines naturally with the layers below it to produce nice darkening of the clouds without the brownish color cast typical when using the dodge tool.
Seems like both the silhouette and sky should be in sharp focus when shooting at f/14 but maybe not in this case. Shooting at an even higher f/stop might be needed and since you shot at 1/400th you have the lighting to conveniently bump the f/stop. You always want the edging of a silhouette to be crisp and sharp and that does not appear to true in this particular image.
Sorry... this is a lot of verbiage for such a conceptually elegant image.
Photographer found comment helpful.
