this is the original straight from the camera,[thumb]667501[/thumb]
this is the shot that i used for the other one, a lot more saturated, but it is also a 5 shot HDR and then turned into this black adn white one[thumb]667498[/thumb]
I think if you look at Blackp's comments, it would appear as though he may be slightly colour blind. So I wouldnt worry about that comment lol
Just read through some of them. I think he just had a fairly narrow interpretation of what warm colors are. He criticized as many of them for being "hot" as he did for being "not warm enough".
This is mine
I guess it was too abstract for voters.
I think you nailed the reason, at least for my own vote. I could not figure out what it was, but I still did not see it as an abstract. I gave it a 4, I'm afraid. The cropping seemed a bit awkward to me as well.
Just a side note. I seem to be low voting a lot of entries for compression that nobody else sees. I can look through recent challenges and see entries with relatively good votes and glowing comments, then one from me nailing it for JPEG artifacts and tiny file sizes. Am I being too harsh, or am I pointing out things others just miss, but still have an effect?
Am I being too harsh, or am I pointing out things others just miss, but still have an effect?
If the photographer is using as much of the DPC file size limit as they can (say, more than 100kb), it seems to me unreasonable to overly-penalize for compression artifacts they are not allowed to remove. Some subject matter -- no matter how appropriate for the challenge topic -- just can't be made as small as DPC entries muct be without suffering technically. I've had recent entries which had to be compressed at JPEG quality 4/10 (I don't have the Save-For-Web at optimized size feature) to get it to about 120kb. I bet you could have found "artifacts" there ...
Personally I give much more weight to the subject interpretation and composition than I do to technical issues, at least some of which (e.g. lighting) may be an intentional, artistic choice and not a "mistake."
I'm talking about entries that are usually 50k or less, and sometimes the image does not show obvious pixellation, but I can tell clarity has been lost through compression. I have sometimes seen an entry that is close to the challenge size limit, but artifacts are so bad that the image must have been saved with high compression during an intermediate step.
I do know and appreciate that the busier an image is, the higher compression levels need to be. However, those types of images are usually busy enough to hide obvious artifacting and will be close the the 150 or 200k limit. I usually knock off only 1 or 2 points for excessive compression and I always leave a comment to point it out. I'm just scratching my head that few others appear to recognize it.
One of my entries.. I believe the best of 2007.. a monkey shot looked perfectly fine to me on my computer. Checked my scores in university and practically everyone must have heard my screech of horror. It looked extremely pixelized and overblown. I even made a thread here just to see how many people saw the okay version and how many not. I think you may have similar problems. Seeing artifacts when other monitors can't..
My monitor at work is calibrated with a spectrometer, while the one at home is just eyballed. I did notice on my DMC entry that I had a grey area above my eyebrow. Shows on the calibrated monitor, but not at home. Nobody mentioned it in comments, either.
