God wearing Glasser
by whiterook

Comment:
I'd go as far as to say that it's silly, but a great idea and very well done. Thanks for adding spice to the bespectacled portrait experience.

Do you smell something?
by skewsme

Comment:
I wonder if I should feel guilty that I didn't give this my OOBIE vote, as it is probably the most out of box (out of mind?) entry. My heart lay elsewhere. This is a great idea and brilliantly done - heh. I can all but smell it...

Dreams of Clownhood
by jaysonmc

Comment:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám as adapted by Edward Fitzgerald

This probably gets my OOBIE vote because I'm such a sucker (sic) for all the essence-of-clown that infuses the picture. The grain, the lack of uprightness and/or direction, the unicycle that isn't - there's a mood of melancholy tedium which, of itself, is antithesis to photography in general let alone dpc, but it's so up front and total with the emotion that it does it just as the classic clown does it. And if none of that was within a mile of your thoughts or intentions then hey, you got lucky, so make with a big clown smile.

Clown Trash
by Hipychik

Comment:
Hipychic my hero! Lurv they colours...

Dreams of Clownhood
by jaysonmc

Comment:
Damn! Not only do you branch out and take over the brown ribbon industry, you rap out two superbly sensitive shots while you do it. This gives you licence to put on your Pierrot Lunaire costume and sit in the corner with steams of fake tears gushing out of your eyes.
Without having trawled through all the entries, the expected thing would be the obvious clown icon thing - several steps and a ten foot pole removed from the essence of clownerism, i.e. naked emotional naïveté.
Now tell me I can't talk out of my (epithet removed due to orthographic inconsistency).

Light
by pinegan

Comment:
Bello. I envy your Italianness :-)

Driad
by Greetmir

Comment:
Shame. It's a great subject/shot, but it looks as though there's a little movement blur there as well as the soft focus. BTW, as I understand it, dryads are tree spirits, so that to call it a tree dryad is just a touch tautological, maybe.

I think you've done about as much as can be done, and well. I wanted to try something for the blurred/fuzzy lines. Don't know if it helped or could help...

I found a tutorial/guide here which makes a line drawing out of a picture. It doesn't, really, but you have to try it and see. I thought maybe if you could try that :
*duplicate background layer
*desaturate new layer
*duplicate new layer
*invert new layer
*set blending mode to 'color dodge'
*select Blur/Gaussian blur in the filter menu
*play with the slider and watch the line drawing appear

I did all that and increased the contrast a little, before combining the visible layers (i.e. the new ones, the background layer has to be invisible) and then brought back the background layer and chose 'multiply' for the adjusted layer(s)
[thumb]632589[/thumb]

Did it help? You could always mask out parts of it if you decide where the lines need to be made more definite.

Thirsty Dog
by jaysonmc

Comment:
Hey, you got a ribbon :-)

Well done for that and obviously for entering 'after your own heart'.

The idea, as I understand it, that you express of wanting to assemble pictorial elements to use the picture as a sort of semi-abstract canvas, is noble but bloody difficult to carry through. I think this may be one of the reasons why the dpc template - and for that matter a lot of other 'arty' pictures - tend to be uber-simple with textureless backgrounds and only one or two things or pictorial elements. They belong on the walls of similarly arranged appartments that make you want to hold your head in your hands and scream like Edvard Munch.

In the case of this I think there's a bit of an empty space above the dog's head in the top left quadrant. The whole thing gravitates to the brown right side. If you've cropped out more green and washout on the left you could try leaving it in and introducing some straight, vertical (abstract) thing to anchor the side. I'm mostly talking out of my arse here, really, but I've heard that sort of thing often enough and who knows? maybe if we think about it an epiphany may come.

There's a brown ribbon in my portfolio if you want it :-)

Alice in Where?
by Ter

Comment:
What a lovely picture! You'll probably be crucified by the voters though. Never mind, eh.

Hunting
by pointandshoot

Comment:
Very painterly, very portrait.