Luck of the Draw
by Blackbox

Comment by Shrink:
great colors and composition

Yucca Offering
by Blackbox

Comment by Beetle:
A fascinating subject !!!!

Yucca Offering
by Blackbox

Comment by photoslik1967:
I have never seen a Yucca photographed in such a beautiful way. I hope you will make a print available to purchase. Good luck in this challenge. I vote a 9.

Azure Nitemare
by Blackbox

Comment by Elvis_L:
Greetings from the critique Club.

This image is definantly in your face so I will address this from a couple of angles. I for one love in your face horror type images.DPC as a whole does not. There are some people that do, so you will get some good scores from them but for the most part you will not get a good score here from images with a horror element. Of course there have been a few recently that did well so maybe that will change:)

Another thing that I feel kept your score down in this challenge is the darker tone in general. As you can see by the top scores, Bright colors and tones were what the voters were looking for.

Ok so in the end scores are less important than if you like the photo so lets get to how I feel you can improve that. The background is not really helping you here. for this type of photo an entirly dark background could have worked well for me but the half white half black just doesn't work for me. maybe if you had turned the camera so that the dark parts were behind the entire frame. Then you could have used levels in your editing program to help darken and even out the background. the photo seems to have some noise which will happen of course but one way to help have less of it is to expose a little more. with your f 2.7 and ISO 50 are probably too low for this lighting. keep in mind that you can darken the photo later if you want that type of mood. a higher f number will help you get more of a depth of field which will help you get more of you in focus

The first thing that came too my mind seeing this was Kane from the WWE I am not sure if this is what you were going for but if so you did it well. Keep up the good work and continue to think out of the box. I hope this has helped.

Elvis

Pain or Pleasure
by Blackbox

Comment by arnit:
Critique Club:
Hello Brad,

I'm saying pain! :) I like the tone of this picture. I like the vertical lines. They are leading my eyes up and down and always finding something new to watch. I didn't see the face in the bottom left corner. Maby if it was a bit lighter people would notice it more? Good luck in future challenges.

Best regard, Arni

Azure Nitemare
by Blackbox

Comment by Shaman:
yikes! but it certainly meets the challenge. 8 - for pure unique out-of-the-box thinking. A great change from all the flowers.

Azure Nitemare
by Blackbox

Comment by gaston:
what.... scary shot !!

Azure Nitemare
by Blackbox

Comment by slickchik:
Very creepy.

Azure Nitemare
by Blackbox

Comment by accord:
how is this pastel?

Chipmunk Sentry
by Blackbox

Comment by twm122:
Excellent use of rule of thirds