Schmoozed my way into a dump truck bed just right of the center stage to shoot above the crowd, all I have to do is print one of these out for the Mayor. Anything for a shot.
Cropped, hue and sat, USM,curves
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Place: 98 out of 159 Avg (all users): 5.4324 Avg (commenters): 6.7143 Avg (participants): 5.1733 Avg (non-participants): 5.5646 Views since voting: 1058 Views during voting: 331 Votes: 222 Comments: 8 Favorites: 0
WOW! Nice capture! Very well done indeed, capturing the colors of our country and such a nice arrangement on top of it. Must have been worth it to schmooze your way up, LOL! :)
I really do like the colors and the moment the shot was captured, but like others, the white is a bit blown out, hard to deal with in any shot even in post processing but I can tell also that if the white wasn't blown out a bit the reds and blues would have been much less noticable. Hard choices to make. Something else I noticed was the green dots at the bottom. A bit distracting to me, a slightly tighter crop to take them out or to clone them out would help a bit.
The last thing I noticed was the balance of the shot. You have no control over the line on the top, LOL and that's not what bothered me. It took a moment of looking to figure it out but then it hit me, like a shovel in the face, and btw, that really hurt ;-P
Anyway, what I noticed was the negative space on the left compared to the right. On the right the blue is coming right to the edge of the shot or very close to it. While on the right it's not even close. The rule of thirds doesn't apply here so it looks a touch off balance as a result. The lines where the fireworks are coming up give you the level feeling so the rising left to right line of the top doesn't botther me but the amount of space on either side is a bit bothersome.
That's all I have to say except again, WOW! Nice overall capture, with just a few cropping adjustments and/or cloning you have a fantastically wonderful shot here that I would be proud to put up on my wall!
Hope my comments help and good luck in future challenges!
0-2 Meets Challenge: 2
0-3 Technical Merit: 1
0-3 Creativity: 1
0-2 Biased Wow Factor: 1
Total = 5
Unfortunately the blown out areas damage this shot (and I like blown out areas to a degree)