Follow Your Nose
by dixonp1

Comment:
A little soft for my taste, but the dramatic colors are wonderful. Excellent work. 8

The Grooming Habits of Hyacinth Macaws
by L1

Comment:
Beautiful birds, well-composed and presented. One of the better images in this group. 8

Bald Eagle
by tyt2000

Comment:
Stunning. One of the sharpest raptor shots I've seen. Composition is quite good, although a tighter, vertical crop might have had even more impact. Should make the top 10 easily. 9

Poker Face
by CorySmith

Comment:
An interesting animal captured with good sharpness and color. The expression is ho-hum and I might have cropped it a bit more off-centered, but the outstanding DOF and bokeh really make this shot (I smell an expensive lens at work). The result is almost three-dimensional, and that will make it stand out from most of the other entries.

Drool
by doctornick

Comment:
One of the best of the bunch. Composition, color, exposure, and focus are all very good. A less "bored" expression would have been nice, but that's kinda' hard to control. ;-)

Do you like my yellow ankle bracelet?
by coolhar

Comment:
An interesting subject with great color and sharpness. DOF and exposure are also quite good. You probably should have positioned the bird more to the right for a better composition. I don't often comment on titles, but with the popularity of those yellow plastic bracelets, "Livestrong" would have made a great title. ;-) 7

Big Kid, Little Kid
by scalvert

Comment:

Originally posted by thatcloudthere: I can't believe this got in the top 20!

Me neither, but concept is king. I didn't have time to set up something less posed, and the PS work was pretty lousy with only my laptop screen to work on. Ordinarily this wouldn't meet my own standards for entry, but I miss my update button. *sniff*

North American Nebula
by strangeghost

Comment:
Once again, a great shot. You're having WAYYY too much fun. I'd expect three minutes at ISO400 to result in a fair amount of grain on a 10D, so I'm curious to know how much of the shot is noise vs. stars. It also looks like you're getting a LOT of purple fringing with that lens (blue stars ain't THAT blue). Although it's not as wide, I suspect that your 70-200 wouldn't do that. You might also try a longer exposure at f/8.

Fireworks-1 07-04-05
by SJCarter

Comment:
This one is VERY nice. Pity we don't have fireworks all the time. This would've worked well in several past challenges (In the Beginning, Extreme Action, Abstract...).

Camouflage?
by scalvert

Comment:
Hmm... I wouldn't have given the blurred spot a second thought. I couldn't go much smaller on the aperture without a tripod, so the shallow DOF was a given. The background did bother me, though. I took a shot at changing the background color (purple was very nice), but I didn't have time to mask everything off properly and do it right, so I abandoned the idea. Obviously, I didn't have time for that little experiment either. ;-)