The photo before this was called an abstract. I think these achieve that goal much better; shape, texture, form and composition. Very nice in my opinion but I'd trim the bottom of the first looking for that golden 1:1.619. I've been to Pagosa Springs and people there advised me that Mesa Verde wasn't and good visit. WRONG!! Next time up that way I'm going.

The composition doesn't do anything to excite me, four stripes. The texture of each stripe is interesting but nothing moves my eye around from stripe to stripe. With a great picture, when you're too far back to tell what it is in detail it is still an interesting arrangement of shapes. My opinion.

Here is a connect to plugins. I don't understand the plugin part but the rest of the tutorial is very enlightening. As I understand the Golden Triangle concept more the photo I posted fits into the concept better than I originally thought.

http://powerretouche.com/Divine_proportion_tutorial.htm

They may have it mismarked with some lower number but it was straight enough for 70 mph and maybe more. In Texas if we didn't drive 70+ on the two lane roads we'd never get out of the state and into Colorado.

This has been incredibly eye opening for me. I have known about thirds and balance. I've also known about having a place at the edge of a picture where the eye can enter and then move around looking at all of the pieces but I've never seen how the spiral does this so perfectly. The link OnDSnap suggests made me aware of the Golden Triangle concept. To take up Festina Lente challange to post I looked through some of my recent favorites and saw triangles in this fortunate shot from southern Colorado. I was on a 70 mph two lane black top and as I zipped accross a narrow bridge I looked up to the right and and was surprised at what I thought I saw. I was nearly standing in traffic to take this and just hoped that cars didn't meet on the bridge.

Without thinking I have a line from the top right to the bottom left making a triangle and then one from the bottom right to the first line making two smaller triangles. I removed power lines across the top but little else. I suppose cropping would make the triangles more exact but at the loss of clouds.

I just came out of a similar situation of wanting to upgrade but the high ISO wasn't so much of an issue. I last weekend chose the D 7000 with a Tamron 18-270 mm with stabilization. It was under $2k and you have the advantage of a fast prime that I do not enjoy yet. The Tamron is not fast f/3.5-6.3 but the D 7000 handles it's high ISO well.

I find it very sad that so much stress has been generated from such amazing photography. I am not at all surprised that these photos were chosen. Most sorry about the fallout.

A lovely picture but......... Were the colors like that or did you change them? I have never seen such a lavander sky. I frequently see lavender clouds on an orange sky. As an artist you're free to recolor at will, I was just curious.

Nice to look at. thanks

A Navy pilot, flight instructor, friend of mine told me that one of the laws of aerodynamics is "With enough horsepower (thrust) you can make the barn door fly".

I read somewhere that if your pictures aren't good it's because you weren't close enough. YOU WERE CLOSE ENOUGH!

Interesting clouds! I'm intrigued with the different clouds in different parts of the US and changing seasons. Apparently out of the US we encounter another range of clouds. Thank you for catching and sharing your British clouds with us. Well done!

There are many discussions about DOF some with much math involved, why not set and lock the Aperture and Focus, then press the preview button and look around? See what's in focus and what isn't.

One other thing, if we ever loose the name Ugly Hedgehog I would suggest Circle Of Confusion as a replacement.

"Straight out of the camera" is interesting but with today's camera we have available a ton of Pre Processing available. There was a time when our choices were Ektachrome or Kodacrome but today we can choose SCENES or situational modes such as flowers and then we have WB and adjusting the colors within WB. Were the saturation and sharpness set at zero, was the picture mode vivid, natural or something else? A lot of "processing" choices before the click. Many more in the camera choices than shutter, aperture and ISO.

Repeat djmarti. He just said it first.