Photography forum image of the month — July 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.

Time for Sun­flow­ers by mibriet

I chose this image for sev­eral reasons:

Impact — Wow, bang, kapow, this is an extremely strik­ing image and it’s a plea­sure to look at it.

Sharp­ness — Love the sharp­ness here. This is par­tially achieved through focus stack­ing (where mul­ti­ple images with dif­fer­ent focus points are blended together)

Degree of dif­fi­culty — This is no easy shot to get. mibreit waited for the right time of day to get this. Dur­ing the shoot both expo­sure AND focus were shot dif­fer­ently on mul­ti­ple frames. Then in PP these were all blended. A whole lot of love and ded­i­ca­tion went into get­ting this gor­geous image.

Colour — These colours sing. There’s also some great jux­ta­po­si­tion in the colours of the sky ver­sus the colours in the foreground.

Blend­ing — The blend­ing of the var­i­ous expo­sures (and focal points) is taste­fully done here to my eye. Some­times HDRs or DRIs are too over­done and call atten­tion to them­selves. This is not the case here for me. The greens here are the only colour that I may have toned down slightly (but they still work for me and we are in the realm of per­sonal taste at this point). If I have one nig­gle, I can still see a touch of halo­ing around some of the leaves, but I can totally live with it.

Com­po­si­tion — Very inter­est­ing ele­ments through­out the fore­ground, midground and back­ground. Although there are mul­ti­ple things to focus on, the large fore­ground left flower is extra-sharp and just slightly brighter than the other flow­ers, thus mak­ing it one of the main focal points.

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 post 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 mibreit for cre­at­ing this gor­geous image!

I¯¿½d also like to include these 3 images as hon­ourable mentions.

Crum­mock Water by Richard

Tas­ma­nia — ‘The Chrurch — Port Arthur’ by Mad Aussie

Sum­mer Shower by Barefoot