This is an interesting and challenging image to critique. Having spoken with you in the past and seen the quality of some of your nature and landscape studies I feel you probably intended the soft focus, fuzzy quality of this image. Or, at least, having seen it, decided it was a happy accident and chose to be brave and offer it up for DPC voters. ;-D
I applaud you for sticking by your creative guns. You've certainly entered enough challenges to know the mind of the average DPC voter and that this was likely to suffer in the voting.
Leaving aside the soft focus for a moment, let's concentrate on the composition. I feel it is quite good and shows a skillful eye for using the foreground to frame a far away subject to draw the viewer's eye. This view through the shadowy branches creates an almost eerie 'watcher in the wood' like mood. Very likely not the intention but effective nonetheless. The casual viewer probably did not notice the lovely pale blue ring around the moon so you probably suffered from 'doesn't meet the challenge' voting. This blue,combined with the extreme glow of the moon, creates an interesting confusion in my mind. It could be the sun shining in a twilit sky. Very surreal. There is a vignette effect created within the frame of the trees by the darker clouds which I find heightens the surreal mood. I have to admit, I quite like this shot. If I had not been critiquing for the CC I may have dismissed it as 'too blurry' but having the time to really peruse it, I find it has a dreamlike quality to it--much like the images created through a pinhole camera. It is not the type of image that will ever win a ribbon on DPC but I rather like that you saw an opportunity and went ahead and made the image despite the lack of a tripod. Certainly, the pioneers of hand-held photography attempted similar 'experiments'.
So, in closing, I find I enjoy the eerie, dreamlike quality of this image which I attribute to the combined factors of the pale blue sky and glowing moon, the soft focus, the vignetting of the clouds, and the 'watcher' like mood of the framing.
Though fitting the challenge, this image needs help in my opinion.
I don't know if you intended on this being a soft focus shot or it was just blurry, but in my opinion, it hurts the image. Good subject.
This seems to be in no proper focus and the challence was supposed to be about somethig blue but not the moon. But well, there is a blue circle around the moon.
Not sure if it was intentional or not, but this seems to be quite out of focus. Otherwise, the composition is very nice, and the harsh contrast works well.
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