Well I was stumped. Not a clue as to what to do for this, and judging by the forums and the low number of entries (127 at 10:23PM Sunday?) that a lot of other people were too. Now this is a fantasy as it is by no means astrophotography...not in the least. This is a shot of street reflections on the front of a building in Philly. I have shot it before but not close up and was thinking of using it for the metal challenge since the reflections are on burnished steel (I think). But the bend of the light reflections reminded me of Saturn so it is in the Fantasy World challenge instead.
Shot with camera on a tripod. I took several shots and then decided which variation I wanted to get. Getting it involved some timing as I wanted some yellow in the image and that meant timing the shot to when the yellow traffic light was lit across the street. So I counted and I got the yellow and then the yellow, red and green in this in a 3 shot auto bracket with the camera set on timer. Manual focus.
Post: Rotate and Crop. Layer adjustments for levels, brightness/contrast, hue/saturation. Reduce noise. Additional saturation. Burnt the bright red ring a bit and dodge the others. Cloned out a few blemishes in the green rings. USM. Resize. USM.
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Composition and color generally good. Concept is fine.
The general poor photographic quality of this image will hurt it in scoring. It has a lot of granulated detail that will be interpreted as an image defect by most viewers.
You might consider a couple things for improvement. First apply an excess amount of noise reduction to remove the granulation and smooth the borders in the trasition areas. It would add to the ring illusion you are trying to achieve. Then pick a couple colors and increase their saturation a lot to draw attention to them and add more visual interest to the composition. Color painting in a 50% greyscale layer is probably the best way to do that but simple saturation increases for the selected colors would probably work well too.
Interesting idea and concept! Just lacks a point of interest, like a "spaceship" going through it, or soemthing like that!. I know it might not have been possible, due to the subject you used to simulate this. But it does lack a little "punch"
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