Flare Interrupted by
dmaddenComment: This is in my top three.
I short-listed 26 entries that interested me enough to want to look at them again (I gave them all a brief "Highly commended - 7" comment, if you want to identify them). Quite a few were arguably better photographs than this one technically, but this picture made my top-three cut because it is unapologetically different and authentic. It doesn't look like any other picture, and it doesn't even want to try to do so, and for me that's
far more commendable than just doing something common uncommonly well!
Shooting into the light is difficult and unpredictable, and nearly always seems to produce various unexpected little graphic rewards: photographic birthmarks that some observers insist on seeing as blemishes (and so they'd clone them out or otherwise screw the thing up, or even more likely they'd avoid the contre-jour experience altogether). This picture is all the more lovely, and the more interesting, for its 'flaws'. It succeeds not in spite of, but
because of, the limitations imposed by the way it was shot.
I know I'm laboring the point, but I reckon it's worth it. There are many superficially impressive pictures in this challenge, but the world is no worse off should they never have existed. They add nothing that we don't already have a tiresome surplus of. Your picture
does add something we didn't have before, or at least that we didn't have enough of. Thank you. And please accept an Order of the Thumb.
Photographer found comment helpful.
