Ball
by colorcarnival

Comment by spiritualspatula:
Awwwwww Didn't vote, but what a great pet photo. Does an excellent job of summing a cat's place existence within our lives. Very nice.

At least it still made profile :)

Ball
by colorcarnival

Comment by PennyStreet:
Congrats on the top 5!

Ball
by colorcarnival

Comment by smardaz:
i like that you can't see the cat's face, it's unconventional

Ball
by colorcarnival

Comment by nam:
Wonderful capture - loved it. Congratulations on the HM!

Ball
by colorcarnival

Comment by markwiley:
Thought this might be yours. A beauty. Congrats on the HM and fantastic image. This was my high scorer but I did not get back to comment.

Ball
by colorcarnival

Comment by JuliBoc:
Yay! I loved this one and gave it a 10. The light and composition are beautiful. Congrats on 4th place!

Ball
by colorcarnival

Comment by PennyStreet:
Wonderful rich tones. Can't argue the space either.

Good Morning, Sunshine
by colorcarnival

Comment by nam:
I gave it a 5 and almost bumped it to a 6 - I thought the light through and detail in the wings was quite special. You got some particularly nice thoughts from spiritualspatula - he's right; the competition in a Free Study is crazy so I think you can mentally add a few 10ths to your score - definitely not a sub four.

Ball
by colorcarnival

Comment by mariuca:
you got it!

Good Morning, Sunshine
by colorcarnival

Comment by spiritualspatula:
I would've voted it a 5. It's not a bad photo, but I think the DPC crowd is just overwhelmed with crazy good wildlife/nature photos. It's REALLY hard to enter one and get much of anything. I consider any nature type shot I can pull over a 6 to be a pretty big success in DPC land.

Now, you don't always need to have exotic animals, but you DO need to have them in a dynamic and unusual way. The more ordinary your object the more you need to remove it from that ordinary-ness that the voter feels. For this, making the bird more prominent in the frame, either alighting or landing, looking at the camera, showing intensity, that sort of thing, will go a long way.

As a personal thing, I normally try to keep my nature/wildlife shots devoid of the non-natural unless I'm using it as a part of the statement of the photo. The reason I do this is because people have this idea with wildlife that there is still this pristine world that is untouched, and they react more to this romanticized vision than if you didn't take that approach.

I did find it amusing, but you have to make humor a stronger focus if you're trying to garner votes from it.