Photography forum winning images of the month — Round five 2014/2015

Hi pho­tog­ra­phy lovers,

In case you are new around here this is where the Admin (me) chooses one (occa­sion­ally 2) excel­lent pho­tos nom­i­nated by other mem­bers from the Member’s monthly choice forum. Once 10 images are nom­i­nated, I choose a ‘winner’.

Just so it’s clear, the photo(s) I choose are not nec­es­sar­ily the best ones of the month. I’ve come to real­ize it’s not really log­i­cal to pit images from totally dif­fer­ent gen­res against each other. That’s why there are cat­e­gories in photo con­tests. My goal is to sim­ply choose an excel­lent photo and talk about why I think it rocks.

This round of nom­i­na­tion yielded images of excep­tional qual­ity and now for the sec­ond time in a row I was unable to choose just one.

This round’s two win­ners are “If you wait by the river long enough, the bod­ies of your ene­mies will float by.” by mbrager and Fort Myer’s Beach Bird­ing by Mike Bons

I chose these images for sev­eral reasons;

“If you wait by the river long enough, the bod­ies of your ene­mies will float by.” by mbrager

 

 

1 — Mood/Contrast/Exposure — I like every­thing about this image but it’s the expo­sure itself and the sub­se­quent post-processing (which I’ll get to) that are the stars for me. This is a late sun­set shot and it looks and feels like it. The con­trast is low, as it should be, and yet beau­ti­ful shadow detail dances with vary­ing degrees of high­light detail. This cre­ates the won­der­fully gor­geous and thought­ful mood of the image.

2 — Com­po­si­tion — Extremely well framed image and I can see the delib­er­ate think­ing that went into mak­ing it. Very thought­ful place­ment of the focal points and other ele­ments that make up the image. I love the dark moody reflec­tions at fore­ground left that seem to play diag­o­nally with the brighter high­light reflec­tions in the water as well as in the sky. There are lots of gor­geous lines for our eyes to fol­low in this pho­to­graph. These include the snow­line at midground left toward the cen­ter, bridge­line in the cen­ter, ver­ti­cal lines in the trees and reflec­tions. There are even lines in the sky for our eye to explore and enjoy.

3 — Post pro­cess­ing — Fab­u­lous choices were made in this regard. Temp­ta­tion was surely there to pull addi­tional high­light detail as well as shadow detail from the water in par­tic­u­lar. This would have made the tones more dra­matic and excit­ing, but it would have for­ever changed the mood and turned this into a com­pletely dif­fer­ent, and less inter­est­ing photograph.

(4) — The title — I don’t think it influ­enced my deci­sion, but I’m a sucker for per­fect titles like this one.

 

Fort Myer’s Beach Bird­ing by Mike Bons (Red­dish Egret)

 

1– Colour, Clar­ity and sharp­ness — All 3 are superb in this image. I really like the tones of grey in the feath­ers and the red­dish feather tones as well. The colours and con­trast look natural.

2 — Ges­tur­ing and deci­sive moment — The bird’s ges­ture is grand and Mike’s quick trig­ger fin­ger was there to cap­ture it.

3 — Expo­sure — Expo­sure is bang on for me. A nice high shut­ter speed cap­tures the lovely feather detail and a medium aper­ture on a long lens gets good eye and feather sharp­ness while blur­ring the back­ground for good fore­ground to back­ground separation.

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

Con­grats again to Mike Bons and mbrager!