Weekly photo contest Sept23-30: Fall Colours

…but before I go, an archive entry since fall has not quite kicked in yet this year. Hot and dry doesn’t do much for leaf change, though the weather is about to turn finally!
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OldMacs4Me said:
Nothing more Canadian than Maple Leaves, so colours is right on track.:)

Other than that, just 24 more hours to help make things even more difficult for the judge!
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Depending on how old you are, you might find this exciting, but I have one of Curtis Joseph's old goalie sticks, but back from his St. Louis Blues days.
 
Sorry to take so long. The were so many outstanding shots that narrowing it down to just 3 was extremely difficult. I was really hoping that @AlaskaMoose would step up and take his lumps on this one, thereby saving me the grief of leaving some very worthy entries off the podium. Anyways look out below, 'cause here we go.

@Allyance
Perfect image to kick off the topic. Even made me look up Letchworth State Park. I like the non-standard cropping, but found myself wishing there was just a sliver more on the right side.

@stillcrazyman
You did a great job of getting that single leaf in perfect focus with everything else smoothly blurred. I love this image.

@mackmgg
So many more outstanding images to be found around Maroon Bells other than the cliché and I certainly like this one. Altitude and overcast skies have biased the image a bit towards the cyan/blue. I’d have been tempted to at least partially correct that.

@fauxtog
Certainly a worthy candidate for a poster print. Makes me wish I was sitting on that bench or walking that trail. Perhaps biased a bit too much toward the red, but I do love this image.

@Janichsan
I suspect you have your monitor set a little brighter than mine. This image really comes to life when I kick up the contrast and black level a bit on my monitor. My eye wandered a bit before finally settling on one leaf just left of and just above centre.

@xodh
Stone bridges can be deceptively difficult to photograph. You’ve presented an image perhaps somewhat lost in the mists of time. I like it a bit better when I back off the contrast of my monitor. That may be just a slight difference in our eyes or how we set our monitors.

@akash.nu
I usually really like your work and some of it is absolutely superb. For whatever reason with this image I found the sky kept pulling my eye away from the main subject.

@katbel
Vivid fall colours and I love the fine detail. Great balance left to right but I think it could have been improved had you captured a bit more foreground and cropped down almost to the top of the tower.

@AxisOfBeagles
Where’s the dog? Some debate in my head as to whether this met the subject. Lots of fall leaves but almost all of them are completely blurred. OTOH the fire plug which is the centre of focus, is certainly dressed for the occasion. Personally I would have gone with a non standard cropping and trimmed a bit from the right side of the image, but not so much that you centred the hydrant.

@dwfaust
I like this image but the skewed horizon line does bother me.

@Clix Pix
Another close up take on fall. For whatever reason I think I would have cropped this almost square removing much of the left side. That said I do like it as is.
Either I am going crazy or between yesterday morning when I wrote my comment and this morning when I did the final judging, you edited it exactly as suggested. Looks like one of us is disqualified. If it's me I apologize profusely.

@Laird Knox
You gave me a good chuckle and in these times that is much appreciated. Thanks!

@OldMacs4Me
Not really an entry, but it doesn’t matter. There were stronger entries.

@Q-Dog. I like the single maple leaf even if it never made it to red. Not sure what sort of post imaging capabilities you have, but darkening just the background could make this image really dramatic.

@mollyc
I am a big fan of your narrow focus images. In this one I love the detail when viewed at full resolution. However in this particular case my eye never really settles in. It just keeps wandering along the focused streak.

@AllergyDoc
Classic composition, but not in the least cliché. And you really did capture a multitude of fall colours. I love it.

@soulreaver99
Guessing those are oak leaves and yes brown is a fall colour. The combo of a wide lens and downward angle gives a distorted feel to the right side of the image. Might be worth skewing the top right corner in and the bottom right out to see if that helps.

@tizeye
I suspect we set our monitors a bit differently. This one was dark enough that I had to crank up the black level to appreciate it, but once I did, I really liked it.

@Darmok N Jalad
Normally your images seem spot on when I view them. So I judged as presented. That said this image could really be made much more dramatic by upping contrast, then adjusting density as needed.

Thanks to everyone who entered. There are more podium worthy entries than there are spots available. Here are the winners and there is a ton of room for disagreement.

Third Place: @katbel and @Q-Dog
Second Place: @xodh
First Place: @AllergyDoc
 
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[mention]OldMacs4Me [/mention] awesome judging as usual. Thanks for your kind words. I wasn’t too happy with my entry either but that’s what I had around me, hopefully a better entry next time.

Congratulations to all the winners and everyone participated.

As usual, looking forward to the next one.
 
I like to start things off, picture was just a casual shot while we were on a walk through Letchworth. Living in Rochester NY and going to RIT, I had a older photo professor that taught color photography and he spent countless hours at Letchworth.
 
Congratulations, Allergy Doc and everyone on the podium! There were some really colorful and interesting entries this past week!

OldMacs4Me, I hadn't touched my entry since I initially shot and edited it in September 2020! Except, of course, to look through my files from last year and select it as an entry in this competition.... I can't remember now what prompted me to do the cropping in the way that I did, but I agree that the almost-square styling suits the subject well. Don't know why I didn't make it absolutely 1:1 square, though. ?? Probably there was something else in the original scene that I wanted to eliminate in order to make a stronger, more powerful image, and the cropping did the trick.
 
Congratulations to all of you, judge included for his thorough work.
I’m so happy for the 3rd place 🥉 , thanks ☺️
 
Clix Pix said:
Congratulations, Allergy Doc and everyone on the podium! There were some really colorful and interesting entries this past week!

OldMacs4Me, I hadn't touched my entry since I initially shot and edited it in September 2020! Except, of course, to look through my files from last year and select it as an entry in this competition.... I can't remember now what prompted me to do the cropping in the way that I did, but I agree that the almost-square styling suits the subject well. Don't know why I didn't make it absolutely 1:1 square, though. ?? Probably there was something else in the original scene that I wanted to eliminate in order to make a stronger, more powerful image, and the cropping did the trick.
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In that case we'll call it a brain fart on my part, and give you a well earned share of third.
 
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Thanks @OldMacs4Me for taking the time to set this up, judge and comment so thoroughly.

That ancient stone bridge in Sebergham, Cumbria, England was lost and swept away in a storm. So chuffed it made second place, against such strong entries. Well done everyone.
 
xodh said:
Thanks @OldMacs4Me for taking the time to set this up, judge and comment so thoroughly.

That ancient stone bridge in Sebergham, Cumbria, England was lost and swept away in a storm. So chuffed it made second place, against such strong entries. Well done everyone.
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It really is lost in the mist of time, and you think of those as being almost indestructible.
 
xodh said:
Thanks @OldMacs4Me for taking the time to set this up, judge and comment so thoroughly.

That ancient stone bridge in Sebergham, Cumbria, England was lost and swept away in a storm. So chuffed it made second place, against such strong entries. Well done everyone.
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Wow that bridge looks so solid!
 
Thanks much for the honor. Fall colors are my favorite to photograph where I live now.

That picture was taken in Hobble Creek Canyon, Springville, UT, Oct. 2013, with a Nikon D80 and Nikkor 18-200 VR zoom. From the name of the file, I see that it was run through DxO on a Windows machine. I think I switched over to Mac the following spring. ISO 160, lens at 66mm, f11, 1/30 sec, .7 ev to keep the image from getting too light.

The beauty of canyon is being spoiled by humans; mainly people camping where there is no camping and driving their 4x4s where they're not supposed to be driven. Plus they're knocking down rail fences and turning hillsides into pop-up shooting ranges where they don't clean up after themselves.

Be back in a bit with a new challenge. Thanks again.
 
AllergyDoc said:
Thanks much for the honor. Fall colors are my favorite to photograph where I live now.

That picture was taken in Hobble Creek Canyon, Springville, UT, Oct. 2013, with a Nikon D80 and Nikkor 18-200 VR zoom. From the name of the file, I see that it was run through DxO on a Windows machine. I think I switched over to Mac the following spring. ISO 160, lens at 66mm, f11, 1/30 sec, .7 ev to keep the image from getting too light.

The beauty of canyon is being spoiled by humans; mainly people camping where there is no camping and driving their 4x4s where they're not supposed to be driven. Plus they're knocking down rail fences and turning hillsides into pop-up shooting ranges where they don't clean up after themselves.

Be back in a bit with a new challenge. Thanks again.
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congrats!
 
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