A bad day at the office
by Doubledizzle

Comment:
Sure is a bad day when you get hit in the eye. Maybe it's a bad night on the town. Doesn't quite hold my attention somehow - perhaps the gentle feeling that it's posed. Something to give it a touch of reality would make it all the more gripping, but that ain't there ...

Lady Liberty
by typologic

Comment:
High Contrast for sure. And you had either the luck or the patience to wait for good clouds, which makes such a difference. Sense of detail is a little obscured - which could be something like neatImage, or simple file size requirements, and there's nothing to be done in Basic so one can't really vote down on that. My only regret is that the people aren't just a touch more distinct, to properly show the scale - I doubt many people will see them.

Simply Beautiful
by Kandy Kane

Comment:
Hard going to see this as high contrast from here - look at the gentle and subtle variations of the skin tones, few of which go anywhere near even dark grey. And your solid black border just emphasises the available distance in tonality. It seems to me that you had the raw material there whicha simple push of the levels would have put into the challenge dimension - in a way that would have been pretty successful. I've no idea whether it's a good portrait - I don't understand such things - but I don't think you'd have been far off.

Pharaoh's Wrath
by Blackbox

Comment:
I love the really stupipd comments some people leave - 'oof' indeed. Perhaps she means the impact was so intense she felt winded, that this shot so deeply affected it her it took her breath away, only too literally. Somehow I think not.

Abstract photography setttles generally into two camps - the pretty, which i think we can happily dismiss, and that that suggests some relation to our natural world, the world as percieved by us everyday. taht world of course includes the images, be they film, television or photographic which we are also presented with. Thus the function of this image: if the relationship to the great pyramid was not so clear, your title has nicely thumped that home.

The 'abstract' of course, takes us out of the field of being able to critique the image from any accepted technical standpoint - the recognised technicalities don't hold, and so one one can only comment on the srtistic vision as exhibited - yours, here, is evidently one of steel, of the colder hues and decaying shades of metal and of rust. There is a nice parallel to be drawn there, with the decadent decline of the Egyptian civilisation (when was any civilisation's decline not decadent?), but perhaps that would take us further still away from the proper realm of the abstract.

Masquerade
by RolandB

Comment:
As a point of order, in my experience of masques and carnivale and the like, glasses and masks are hardly unrelated. Whatever; good detailing and light on the mask - and it's a beautiful object too - but your inclusion of the glass seems entirely arbitrary: it's appears oriented differently, weakly placed compositionally - to the extent that one might believe, if told, that it was cropped out of a different photograph; and that was the challenge, I think - to make photographic sense out of the combination. I don't really think you've succeeded - it needs the feeling that these two unrelated objects are at least in the same light space, or something - but I like the mask very much.

September
by Milacroft

Comment:
I like this; I suspect (hope I'm wrong) you'll get a bunch of comments about lack of contrast, but it's just fine as is - has a strong sense of that developing grey of early autumn. Good exposure.

Coyote Pretty
by ronnyt

Comment:
A nice natural portrait, good detail, light etc.; I'd have done something about the sheer brightness of the background - the yellow moments in the trees are really very bright, and could easily have been calmed down a touch to stay as just background.

The Fall
by longships

Comment:
Almost beautiful, this. I would have it in black and white - it would remove the humdrum everyday element that this kind of ordinary colour brings to a photograph - we know the grass is green, the horse is probably brown, the logs are borwn, the sky is a shade of blue etc. etc., and it would focus the attention on the extraordinary shapes of these figures that you have captured.

Clues
by Nitesead

Comment:
Fascinating; the implications of this are tremendous, taking one off in all sorts of directions. The composition is clever, too. Excellent entry.

-Serenity-
by Pander

Comment:
The actual flow of the water has been very well captured in this long exposure - but your framing of it, your composition, lacks finesse I think; there's a discomforting sense of a tilted horizon, but only partially so, so that the viewer is simply discomforted, rather than forced to change their point of view. Placing the waterfall so centrally in frame is also quite weak - the eye is constantly drawn to areas other than what ought surely to be your point pf interest. And finally, there's a blue colour cast to the whole thing, which makes it seem firstly washed out and lacking the drama of light, and secondly, not completely under your control.