Challenge 170 - Keep it local.....

[leeperry]

A walk in the park

[lunarbo]

Be my Valentine?


Be my Valentine? by Bo Bett, on Flickr

[John Liddle]

OK folks - time's up!

You will need to give me a little while to work my way through the entries, but I'll be back as soon as I can.

[John Liddle]

Well, I suspected I was going to get a wide variety of subject matter – and I wasn’t wrong!

Grateful thanks to all who took the trouble to produce and submit an image – a pleasing response.

My thoughts on each image follow – please bear in mind I am merely an enthusiast, so if any of my attempts at helpful critique are a load of old bollards, I apologise in advance.

1. Lavenderhill - House Plant
Orchids are beautiful flowers and provide great subject matter. You have probably chosen one of the more awkward colours here - white is easy to get wrong, but you have caught it well. The whole curve of the spray of flowers is pleasing and the dark background helps to bring the flowers into prominence.

2. CasaRova - Snail and leaves
Nice and sharp with a good depth of field and colour contrast between the snail and the foliage. I would have been tempted to look at a squarer crop - perhaps cutting off the lower portion of the image just below the end of the leaf the snail is on.

3. Powernapper - Lock down blues
A charming image - Misty certainly looks "at one" with Teddy. An interesting blast from the past - taken on a 20D - these old workhorses just go on and on! I note that the shot was taken at 1600 ISO, just one step below the maximum the camera has and there is some evidence of that in the colour noise levels when looked at under magnification of Flickr, but it does not detract from the image when viewed normally.

4. Colin W - View from my street
Well Colin, you are a fortunate fellow indeed to have a view like that outside your front door. A good crisp image, full of lovely detail on Flickr, blessed with a good dollop of sunshine and a sprinkling of the white stuff on the hills behind.

5. Mark2uk - Wall art
What a great Heffalump! I can think of several of my pals who would really like that on their wall. There is some evidence of uneven lighting in the right-hand corners, which I assume comes from using room lighting rather than off-camera flash way out to the left. If you have a flash unit (other than any in-built one) it might be interesting to experiment with bounce flash to see if it can be evened up.

6. Farider - Paperweight
How they make these I could never understand but looking at the great detail in this image on Flickr gives the odd clue - you can make out the suggestions of interfaces between different layers of glass near the base, so perhaps they are made in layers and then melted together. I love the detail inside the glass but the main thing that leaps out at you is the great colours, accentuated by the black background.

7. Bhuna - Two tyred
I get a definite sense of where the power lies in your house - and I'm fairly sure it is with these two! Excellent exposure control here - it would have been so easy to have the subjects right and the window blown out or the window correct and the dogs a mere silhouette.

8. Alex - Winter Iris fruit
I have to confess I did not realise that Iris produced fruit like this. The vivid fruit colour makes a great contrast with the dried seed case and the snow.

9. Colyton John - Hiding in my shed
To paraphrase Aldous Huxley, "Man's in his shed, all's well with the world". There he sits, deep in his man-cave, Lord of all he surveys, with everything essential to existence - lots of bits that "might come in useful sometime" and a glass of beer! It would be interesting to see how the image looked as a mono conversion.

10. EOSWinters - Blue tit
This is pretty good for a window shot - yours are clearly (intended pun) cleaner than ours. I see that you have used a relatively short expose time (presumably to freeze the subject - they don't half jump about) and a small aperture (presumably for DOF). The resultant ISO of 16000 is far higher than I would normally use and I assume it has necessitated a moderate amount of noise reduction. The combination of the ISO level and the small aperture has softened the image a bit and I would be tempted to lose some DOF by using a wider aperture as a trade-off for gaining lower ISO. It might mean you only get the eye in full focus, but that's OK.

11. Brian - Houses and trees
I have never tried the “in-camera” multiple image facility and I imagine it must be very difficult to get the alignment between images that one is aiming for. The colour variation on this which you posted in the Abstract Channel works quite well, but I’m afraid that, for me at least, this mono version is not so pleasing. Sorry.

12. Gary – A walk in the park
You have captured just how many of us feel at the moment I suspect – isolated in a relatively featureless environment with no joyful colour to inspire us. The footsteps provide a nice lead-in, but I might have been tempted to lose the bench and waste bin at the far right.

13. Bo – Be my Valentine?
A lovely shot which poses lots of questions in the viewers mind – is this a courtship dance?- Is the bird at the rear about to attack? – are both of them throwing their wings in the air to try and avoid going base over apex on the ice? Whatever the truth of the matter, it’s a nice image.

So now the tricky bit………

In traditional reverse order my favourites are:

3. Colyton John – Hiding in my shed
2. Rose (Lavenderhill) – House Plant
1. Ian (Farider) – Paperweight.

Well done Ian and over to you!

[Lavenderhill]

Thank you John for the judging and comments, it was a good to see the number of entries you received and the range of subjects.
well done to my fellow podium placee and congratulations to Ian on first place with a great pic. I look forward to the new Challenge.
Rose.

[Farider]

Goodness gracious! Thank you John for setting the challenge, the judging and your kind comments. And well done to my fellow podiums, Rose and John.

I’ll now go away to contemplate the new challenge!

Ian

[ColytonJohn]

A great topic that attracted both variety and quality images. Congrats to my fellow podium standers Rose and Ian and many thanks to John for setting and judging it.

Cheers,
John

PS John: I'll create a mono conversion as you asked so nicely

[Daisy M]

Well don Ian & Rose & John. A terrific turnout of shots, sorry I never entered this month, but well done Mr Liddle for setting such a great challenge. Look forward to Ian's challenge.

[EOSwinters]

Thanks for setting and judging this, not easy with such a wide brief. Congratulations to Ian & Rose and John.

[@imagesBV]

Congrats...Ian, Rose and John....
....thanks for running this John.....it must have been very difficult to judge........looking forward to the next.

[lunarbo]

Good to see lots of entries and some great shots.

Congrats to the Podii People and of course to John for running it

[AlexR!]

Thanks for setting and judging so proficiently, John. Congratulations to all those placed and particularly Ian for the win. Well done all.

[Bhuna]

Thanks john and well done everyone and Ian for the win.