My daughter didn't understand why I brought my camera when taking her back to her college after thanksgiving. After I drop her at school, I get to drive home during the "golden hour", and there is nobody else to be impatient at my stopping to take photos.
Editing notes: I tried something different from the conventional thinking on this. I sharpened it almost as much as possible in my RAW converter (Canon DPP) rather than the minimal sharpening usually recommended. This approach seems to work well if I intend on using most of the image. If I will be severely cropping, however, then It results in visible noise like patterns.
I also resisted the temptation to crank up the saturation to unrealistic "WOW" amounts, in spite of the tendency for that to pull in higher votes. I wanted the shape and details of the tree to be the star of this shot, not the disk sky. A moderate golden glow is to my liking for this. I'm curious to see if anyone comments that I should have raised the saturation a bit.
I may also get some comments about the bottom 1/3 of the image being too dark. The outline of the tree against the dark clouds may be too subtle for some monitors to display.
Pre-challenge notes:
I think this is pretty darn good and would think it good for a high five or low 6. However, I am expecting only a low 5 because:
A) I am usually dead wrong at evaluating how my own entries will do in a challenge.
B) My wife thinks it is one of my best. Her liking one of my shots has been the kiss of mediocrity in the past.
Post-challenge notes:
Did well enough, and from the stats, I can see this had moderate appeal for most and strong appeal for some. The commenter's average vote was quite high. A pretty good entry for me.
Statistics
Place: 65 out of 171 Avg (all users): 5.5271 Avg (commenters): 6.8000 Avg (participants): 5.3958 Avg (non-participants): 5.6049 Views since voting: 898 Views during voting: 193 Votes: 129 Comments: 5 Favorites: 0
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