Nourished By The Sunby
SquishyBComment by Ann: I saw your forum post...I'll bite...
The image definitely meets the challenge, and you've done a nice job keeping the sky blue behind the tree and sun, which is often harder than it looks. The trouble with shooting straight into the sun is that the sun is a really bright light, and everything that isn't the sun becomes unnaturally dark. It looks like you're trying to show the sunlight filtering through the fuzzy seed things, but the sun's really bright, so there's too much contrast for it to be attractive. You might try shooting when the sun's lower in the sky and not so bright.
The other thing is to be careful of your background. In this shot, there's some black, blobby looking pine trees in the background. In the lower right corner, they serve a purpose of showing off the sunlight on the birch tree, but on the left side, they're just dark and distracting, and they look like they're leaning backwards, because the camera is pointed towards the sky.
I think on a shot like this, it really helps to ask yourself 2 questions:
1) What is the subject?
2) Is there anything in the shot that's going to pull the viewer's focus away from the subject?
I just looked at your portfolio. It's no accident that on your top rated images, you've done a great job of isolating the subject, and on the lower rated images, you haven't. Especially on DPC, when the voters only look at the image for a few seconds, if there's anything distracting, the voter won't take the time to look any further.
Photographer found comment helpful.