Gosling Gander
by spiritualspatula

Comment by Tammster:
Would love to see the bird more in focus.

Gosling Gander
by spiritualspatula

Comment by aboutimage:
great DOF, well done

Gosling Gander
by spiritualspatula

Comment by sekarmalathy:
Amazing use of shallow depth of field.

Gosling Gander
by spiritualspatula

Comment by cowboy221977:
Great DOF. I love how the grass fades. The detail on the running duck are great....

Gosling Gander
by spiritualspatula

Comment by tanguera:
Awesome!!!! The only thing keeping it from perfection is the lowered head - not because of composition, but because it isn't lit. The backlight is marvelos, making him look all fuzzy, and the dof brackets him perfectly.

Campsite & Sunset
by spiritualspatula

Comment by DrAchoo:
This image, I think has some real promise. It doesn't look like you put a ton of effort in, but I bet you could polish it up to have a winner. First you need to fix the ghosting in the clouds. Second, of course, you want to level the horizon (duh). You'll also have to work on the saturation lines in the sunset. These days I've been doing landscapes like this with manual blends rather than a program like Photomatix. It leads to less artifacting like we see here.

Day and Night
by spiritualspatula

Comment by DrAchoo:
The sky and upper mountain are classic contrasty material. I think your little tree mound lets you down a bit by being in strong shadow. The trees become mushy and the contrast is pretty light. Still, I'm not sure you would be safe if it were in sunlight because it might get lost in the mountain behind. Sometimes you just do the best with what you got. :)

Tension
by spiritualspatula

Comment by DrAchoo:
5.7? I'm not quite sure why. This is a quality macro. Perhaps one of the difficulties is that it is somewhat inbetween a full on macro and a wider context shot. Dragonflies are hard in that way because they are so large. It's hard to get them all in focus for one thing (although you choose right to focus on the eyes and not wings) and if you go for the zoom-factor "wow" you leave a lot of the bug out (see my last FS) which sometimes isn't the point. I think you did well on this one.

Segue
by spiritualspatula

Comment by DrAchoo:
A nice composition with leading lines of the road and telephone wires (I'm happy you left them in). The lack of clouds is mildly too bad, although you don't always have to have clouds to pull a landscape off. I think you just pumped the blues too high. Blue and orange are classic contrasting colors, but here they look a bit comic and the snow looks like some blueberry meringue.

Expanse
by spiritualspatula

Comment by DrAchoo:
A few of your B&W landscapes caught my eye, but I'm going to start here down in the 5.5 range which allows for a picture that has great promise, but didn't quite make it. The sky in this one, of course, is awesome. I'm guessing you are way down near the 10mm end of your lens. Your processing is well done, although I wonder if you couldn't have tweaked just a bit more contrast out of your lower clouds. The feature that lets you down is not having a foreground or, really, any subject. Some pics can get away with that, or the sky itself is the subject, but here our eye needs something more. This is a potential limitation of shooting so wide. Any subject is going to have to either be really close to you or be really big.