Found the swirl really interesting so I took a billion shots of it :)
Setup and shot:
Set up in my bathroom with a tripod directly over the cactus. I turned off all the lights and focused/metered with my flashlight shining on the top of the plant. Set the timer on the shutter and then "painted" the cactus with my flashlight (covered with some toilet paper to dim and diffuse) for the 15sec exposure. Probably could have taken a similar shot with a more traditional lighting setup and fast shutter but hey, I wanted to learn something new.
Postprocessing:
Crop
Levels
Desaturated and then bumped up the saturation in the green channel
Curves
Resize
USM
Border
Statistics
Place: 66 out of 240 Avg (all users): 5.7185 Avg (commenters): 7.7500 Avg (participants): 5.6355 Avg (non-participants): 5.7641 Views since voting: 812 Views during voting: 394 Votes: 302 Comments: 11 Favorites: 0
(Before I start, just want to say I really liked your 8 seconds of fluidity in a recent challenge. beautiful work.)
Okay, here we go. I looked and looked at this image. I even did something unusual for me, I downloaded it and played with the composition on my own computer. (and then erased the image, of course) The pattern you chose is delightful, the handling of light, good and the parts that need to be sharp are sharp, IMO.
Jurassic, there's something about the composition that bothers me. Cutting the flowerpot off at just one side, and not very much of it at that, makes me want to complete the circle, but I can't! (And I think this is why you didn't get into the 6's with your score.) I tried cutting off the circle at two points and that worked a little better, and I tried cutting out the pot circle all together, but that took away the unique-ness that makes your image interesting in the first place.
So, you have a good photo here that the voters thought was interesting enough to get into the high 5 scoring category. But to go higher, play with different compositional components to give it that "wow" factor.
Clever double usage of harmonic division (~0.618 : 1) -- once at placement of center of cactus and once again if you count the spiral arms (13 to the right and 21 to the left which gives ~0.619 : 1).
ah, the golden ratio, what wonderful patterns it produces-
excellently captured from this angle. I love the rich green against the muted background and the perfectly controlled DOF
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