Thank you very much for all the comments and 18th place finish. This was only my 3rd entry on dpchallenge so I'm pretty happy right now.
A few things about my picture:
The bottom marble is cropped by my camera, I tried to crop it out in PS but it took out too much of the cloud and I liked the cloud.
I started off with 75 marbles and ended with 56. I put a sheet out to catch the marbles but they would hit each other and go flying and I couldn't find them in the grass.
It took me around 75+ tosses to get a shot I liked enough to enter. I had several I liked better with nicer clouds, better marbles but they were out of focus, too clumped etc. I spent about 3+ hours on this shot.
I wanted to mess with fast shutter speeds so that's why I picked what I did, it was fun but WAY more difficult than I thought it would be.
This is of course just nitpicking but I would have preferred it if that lowest ball were in the frame and not half out, seems very sloppy to me to not have a photo where they were more perfectly aligned as you must have had the opportunity to shoot this again and again. Anyway, nice idea and I like the OOF backround. 6 from me.
Good idea and great color. I think I would prefer that the marble on the lower left were either 100% included or were cropped out of the shot entirely, but overall a nice shot.
This is marvelous. Getting such sharp focus on the marbles in the air must've been difficult, I imagine - especially with a fast shutter-speed, wide aperture shot like this. Did you really just throw them in the air?
Getting the whisps of cloud on the right to counterbalance the marbles on the left is great. It looks like it was shot with the sun behind you, to get light on the marbles and stop them appearing silhouetted against the sky; correct?
The idea of this photo is a good one. I think you could've cropped the bottom marble out of the photo. it might be interesting to reshoot this one with a dramatic sky.