I Swear to Tell the Truth ...........
by cpanaioti

Comment by Tom:
you should try and sell this to courthouses. There are hundreds around the country...huge income potential!

Edit: Ah! Just noticed you're Canadian. There's courthouses in Canada too, eh? ;-)

Message edited by author 2007-05-31 02:11:42.

Take-Off
by cpanaioti

Comment by Neil:
Very nice! Like my shot, it goes to show that the middle of the pack in a DPC challenge can be a top award winner elsewhere (same as my macro shot). Congratulations Colette!

Composure is Everything
by cpanaioti

Comment by littlefish:
Good but should have a shorter focal point. Blur the background and foreground to highlight more the detail of duck. Needs to be cropped with bird a little higher up.

Composure is Everything
by cpanaioti

Comment by dewdodesign:
you said it yourself, composure is everything but i don't think this has been composed particularly well as there is too much dead space around the duck. Perhaps zooming in a little closer or actually trying to get physically closer would have drawn the attention more to the duck itself.

Sneak Peek
by cpanaioti

Comment by Omni:
Nice DOF and sharpness but it don´t catch me

Take-Off
by cpanaioti

Comment by sherpet:
Beautiful, and it has a sense of freedom about it.....

Take-Off
by cpanaioti

Comment by geewhy:
Superbly captured and should certainly have scored much higher in my opinion.

Sneak Peek
by cpanaioti

Comment by JunieMoon:
Hmmm.

I Swear to Tell the Truth ...........
by cpanaioti

Comment by zardoz:
I just came back to look at this again - it has cheered me up no end. Thank you!

Take-Off
by cpanaioti

Comment by Artifacts:
Positives:
Interesting minimalist composition. Technical quality combined with a good stop action capture are it's main strength. Nice bright backlighting framing the bird.

Technicals:
Solid technical quality. Color, lighting are fine. Looks like you maximized your camera settings to get as good of stop action as possible under the lighting conditions. That is tough when you have to anticipate the action like in a shot such as this.

Despite the shallow DOF the background still looks more mottled than smooth and that is slightly distracting.

It is generally better to capture these shots from the front rather than from behind. That is it's biggest compositional defect. Its a very solid image, though.

The Challenge:
This image scored middle average for the challenge. Voters thought this image was run of the mill. I voted this one 9, which is well above average by my scoring. I like the capture, general technical quality and framing. If taken from in front of the bird it had got a 10.

Suggestions:
You might consider doing a rough selection of the bird and applying some gaussian blur and/or noise reduction to the rest of the image to smooth out the background.

Next time try to capture that bird flying toward you. LOL!!!!