Elias cooling off
by Denise

Comment:
Sweet subject with great lighting, but the cropping off of his fingers hurts the image. Everything from the direction of his hands to the line of his closed eye and his lower lip lead the viewer's eye to the point where his fingers touch the fountain, and that isn't in the frame.

days of glory
by PennyStreet

Comment:
I wish the buried fence had a bit of open sand above it to separate it out from the grass, i think it would make a much stronger composition. There is a lovely set of lights and textures in the lower half of the image, but the upper half is so blocky and blotchy, its part of the story could be told in much less space.

Nobody Plays On Cold Wet Days
by stphq

Comment:
I would have liked it better if you had flipped the images, the heavy ropes of the climbing structure seem to be supported by the chains of the swing, and that creates an odd little jolt. The swing wants to be up top.

Two Beauties
by sfmorris

Comment:
Just lovely, almost makes me miss the days of having a whole bunch of Arabians in the backyard. Almost.

Not Tonight
by Giles

Comment:
If you had cropped tighter, put her eyes closer to the top right, and had her hand with that big ring in the lower left (and widened up the DOF to get the ring in better focus), you would have lost all that lovely bar bokeh, but you would have lost most of those 3 and under scores. Prolly.

The Long and winding road
by Giles

Comment:
This is a lovely subject, but not processed to do well here at DPC. When looking into the sun you often get this sort of low contrast haziness you have here, but being true to what you saw only gets brownie points, not a good score. With a muted color pallet, you have two choices, crank up the vibrance, or convert to B&W.

The main subject is that windy road, but it gets a bit lost in the image, had you zoomed in and rotated the format to portrait so the road filled more of the frame and the sky was no more than the top third (it is a nice, but not spectacular sky) then the image would have the "pop" that is rewarded at DPC.

There was a thread on Graduated Neutral Density filters earlier in the week, and this image could be a poster child of a "without" image that a GND would have helped, that bright sky steals so much of the magic of the rolling landscape where all the tones have been squished down into the right side of the histogram, so they lack dynamic range and color information.

bottles
by ursula

Comment:
Welcome back! So tell us what was in the background which made such an interesting distortion in the bottles.

Mountains in the Sky
by MargaretNet

Comment:
Congratulations on the ribbon Margaret. See? Sometimes the DNMC folk will expand their horizons if they really like an image. Keep pushing the edges, let the ribbons come as they will.

Window
by tvsometime

Comment:
I love the subtle glow and the matching window covering color, the tight pattern of the brick contrasting with the amorphous blobs of light. This will probably miss the popular vote, but I have it in my top two.

red frames
by bvy

Comment:
Damn, I love this shot.