Photography forum image of the month — April 2010

Every month on our¯¿½ pho­tog­ra­phy forum mem­bers nom­i­nate images that they like. Then at the end of the month I choose an excel­lent image and talk about why it rocks. The photo I choose is not nec­es­sar­ily the best one of the month. I¯¿½ve come to real­ize it¯¿½s not really log­i­cal to pit images from totally dif­fer­ent gen­res against each other. That¯¿½s why there are cat­e­gories in photo con­tests. I just choose a photo that has extremely strong ele­ments that we can learn from.

I chose this image for sev­eral reasons:

The eye is tack tack sharp and that’s hard to do on a sub­ject this small, because focus­ing (and dof) is a chal­leng­ing task at this size and dis­tance to sub­ject. Sharp­ness is lovely in many places; leg hairs, tho­rax, abdomen. Blurred back­ground shows no distractions.

The sub­ject has a def­i­nite impact on the viewer. It’s likely very creepy for many view­ers, prob­a­bly because of sharp­ness. My eye is focused on one thing, that fly.

Good com­po­si­tion all around which can be chal­leng­ing at this size as well.

Nice high­light con­trol on what­ever the fly is rest­ing on and the over­all expo­sure is well han­dled with sup­ple­men­tary lighting.

For all these rea­sons, this is my choice for image of the month. Since we all have opin­ions, some mem­bers may dis­agree with my choice. That’s cool but THIS thread is not the place for debate over my pick, NOR is it the place to fur­ther cri­tique the image. The pur­pose here is to sug­gest strong ele­ments in the photo that we may learn from.

Con­grats again OWLP for cre­at­ing this strik­ing image!

I¯¿½d also like to include these 2 images as hon­ourable men­tions as they also came so so close to being picked.

Col­or­less Beauty by Kat

Din­ner time by Richard

Power At Sun­rise by Mad Aussie