I entered the following in "pure" expecting a mediocre finish at best. It's a cliché macro of a rose, it uses a lot of Neat Image, the title is long and "poetic"... Don't get me wrong, I actually LIKE the picture, but I was blown away it finished in top 20.
I particularly enjoyed the balance of too sharp vs too soft comments :-)
I shot this rose at about 1:2 macro at f/2.8, amazingly. I have versions everywhere from f/32 to f/2.8, and the wide open one was by far the best to my eyes...
See...even if you try to be too cliche, you are STILL an amazing photographer with so much talent! You just can't get away from that fact!!! Congrats on your high placement. :)
You're right.. a boring photograph that got lucky.
Shows you just never know.
Yeah, that's pretty much my point. I mean, I like this shot and all, I think it's very pleasant, but there are a heck of a lot of more interesting photos that don't place this high...
Heh to be honest I think its kind of hideous; overly noise-reduced and too much sharpening for my taste. I do enjoy the color and texture of light though. Would you be willing to post a less-edited version?
Heh to be honest I think its kind of hideous; overly noise-reduced and too much sharpening for my taste. I do enjoy the color and texture of light though. Would you be willing to post a less-edited version?
Absolutely unedited original:
As you can see, there's really not that much Neat Image in it. The silkiness is mostly a function of the very soft focus at f/2.8 I think. Quite a bit of sharpening was applied, and the Neat Image was used in conjunction with that so it didn't go too granular on me. I'm willing to concede it may be oversharpened, but I was looking for this hard-edge, soft-focus effect, that was my specific goal when I was shooting it.
Incidentally, this image has NOT been tone mapped :-)
