This was taken on Dec. 28, 2005 in my front yard facing the 7th hole of the golf course. I had went out side about 5 minutes earlier because I heard some wind and hail. I came back into the house and grabbed my camera. The hail had stopped but I looked directly overhead and could see the clouds rotating and in the middle was blue sky.
As it started to form I started taking pictures. This capture was about 1000 to my north after it passed over my house. To give you some comparison on how close, this is the full capture with no crop and taken with a Canon 50mm f/1.8 II. Winds were about 50+ mph when I took this picture. If you look real close on the right bottom you will be able to see some tree limbs in the air. It never touched the ground but did get down to the top of some trees.
It was one wild weather day.
-SDW
Statistics
Place: 75 out of 125 Avg (all users): 5.1930 Avg (commenters): 6.2353 Avg (participants): 5.2658 Avg (non-participants): 5.1650 Views since voting: 1904 Views during voting: 452 Votes: 285 Comments: 23 Favorites: 4 (view)
In response to your request, here is your in depth critique from The Critique Club.
You got 20 comments during the challenge, 2 after the challenge, 8 in the thread asking for opinions and you want an in depth critique too. Not asking for much are ya. *wink* That being said, there really isn't much I can add since it seems that everyone really seemed to cover things pretty well.
Your big downfall obviously was not using the traditional meaning of 'Mother'. When a person thinks of mother, what do they think of? Moms, the person who gave birth to someone. Next I think of Step mom, god mother, fairy god mother, a physical person. Mother Nature is in there, but not high on the list. A photo of a stick wouldn't cut it for me either, but I guess technically would fall into mother nature as well.
Anyway...About the photo itself, it's a photo of a tornado. Not something you see every day for sure, and definately not something you want to get that close to EVER. So it does have interest.
I like the diagonal of the light sky meeting the dark sky and think the photo has nice balance.
Hard to judge focus since it's clouds, but the clarity is really good. I like the detail you show us in the tornado.
There are some aweful cloning marks in the bottom left corner all the way to the tip of the first downward peak. Looks like sloppy editing there.
I would also like to see more of this formation, but I wonder if that would hurt the 'balance' I talked about. I guess it would depend on your positioning and surroundings if you could have gotten a different angle or crop and if it would have worked, but definately something to try.
A neat phenomenon for sure, and only suffered for the challenge interpretation in my opinion.
~Heather~
I think your score got hit because it's a bit out of the box (I gave it a 7). But as an artistic photograph, I think it's fantastic! It has a very painterly quality with a lot of depth of tones. I'm sure it's even better in large format!
Awesome in the true sense of the word! Fantastic processing - can't wait to read any notes you might have added. Love that dark, dark cloud converging with the super bright white, and then all those muddy, undefinable colors in between. Great job.
I think a real tornado would have been better? LOL...Just kidding. I like this depiction of the theme. A bit out of the box, but I like it when they are!
Back for comments. Very interesting capture. I would've like to see a secondary object in the scene to give a sense of scale. Unfortunately though, I don't think the "mother nature" concept will score very in this challenge.
Nice capture. I like the dramatic look, but, if possible, I think cloud shots look better when they have something else in the frame to lend a reference point. 6
This is so incredible. Tornado's are a facinating thing of mother nature. The lighting on the different elements of the cloud are incredible. Do you have a verticle image of this? If you could have caught a little more of the downward spiral would be incredible also. Love it.
Without your very leading title this is a photo of some clouds. On its own it says nothing to me about motherhood. Honestly, even if I decided to allow the title to sway my opinion I would have problems with your interpretation of motherhood. In the end this just appears to be really desperate shoehorning to fit the challenge.
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.
