One Pencil, Sliced
by Amphian

Comment:
I love the strong lighting, saturation and contrast on this photo. It's great how the grid paper pattern shows in the shadows.

wind mill pencil
by aripps

Comment:
There's a kind of softness and subtelty to this photo that I like.

Hana
by muckpond

Comment:
Beautiful. It's a shame there's another one so similar :). The duotone is beautiful and soft, and well exposed. 10 from me - lisae

Storage
by MrsKro

Comment:
Beautiful! The composition of this photo is stunning. I love the way the pencil lines up with the strands of hair, and the way the roundness and softness of the child's ear juxtaposes against the hard wood.

Frustration
by annelizabeth

Comment:
This is a great photo. I thought when this challenge topic came up that most of the photos would be studies of pencils or some other kind of static shot that doesn't really express anything, and I was right! Your photo is a lot more engaging because it uses the pencil as a springboard to explore an emotion. The duotone is great, and I love the textures and shapes of the scrunched up paper :).

Office Boy
by drewmedia

Comment:
Hehe, it looks like you decapitated him. Poor boy! And he's so cute, how could you >:|.

These photos are getting a bit repetitive, it's nice to see something a bit surreal.

None
by manolo

Comment:
I love this photo. I couldn't quite work out what was happening at first, but I see it's an eyeliner pencil. Very nice high contrast work. It suits the subject well, emphasising the dark outlines around her eyes. 10 from me! - lisae

Saturday Night
by elo

Comment:
Nice. The soft focus/graininess makes it a warmer, more personal photo. Very strong composition. In fact, it's so beautiful that I'm giving it 10 - lisae

Utilitarian
by indigo997

Comment:
It's funny that this photo and the other one are so similar. I like them both about the same, although I think the more dramatic black and white of the other one appeals to me more. The subtelty of the lighting and sepia in this photo have their own charm, however.

Sigh...
by lisae

Comment:
The difference between the users with cameras and users without cameras averages on my photo is really huge! I knew I had a lot of technical problems with this photo, but I was too busy to try it again. Still, I actually liked the way the shadow falls across the pencils, separating the image into the "real" world and the "dream" world compositionally. You're not seeing the whitebalance of the camera there, I took most of the green channel out in the curves and pushed everything else around majorly. If I had a tripod or had bothered to set up something to put my camera on, it would have been sharper, but I'm lazy :).

The colours are deliberately red and blue to emphasise some aspects of my idea. Basically, the red pencil is a non-conformist in a blue pencil world, and struggling to deal with reality. He creates a little red dream world to escape to. I don't know what sparked this idea for me, probably the way pencils are always so uniformly lined up and ordered in their packs. Also I was struggling to find an idea that I couldn't imagine anyone else having, so I was trying to be as non-conformist as possible :). But in the end, my aim was to personalise the pencils since I knew most of the photos would not have any personality or emotion in them, and it snowballed from there. This image appeared in my imagination, and I've never felt so inspired before!