Every month on our pho­tog­ra­phy forum mem­bers nom­i­nate images that they like. Then at the end of the month I choose an excel­lent image and talk about why it rocks. The photo I choose is not nec­es­sar­ily the best one of the month. I’ve come to real­ize it’s not really log­i­cal to pit images from totally dif­fer­ent gen­res against each other. That’s why there are cat­e­gories in photo con­tests. I just choose a photo that has extremely strong ele­ments that we can learn from.

Flower Pick­ing at Ast­bury Mere by Richard

This month’s choice is Flower Pick­ing at Ast­bury Mere by Richard

I chose this image for sev­eral reasons:

Gesture/Mood — The over­all ‘ges­ture’ is beau­ti­fully cap­tured in this image. Richard cap­tured his daugh­ter in mid-step while walk­ing through nature play­ing with a leaf and a flower. It feels as though she may have been day­dream­ing; in fact the whole image has a day­dreamy qual­ity due in good part to the ‘ges­ture’ and won­der­ful backlighting.

Post-Processing — The (PP) post-processing here works very well to sup­port the image. I really like the vignetting all around the girl as it empha­sizes the girl’s walk through a field of flow­ers and sunshine.

Selec­tive focus — Shal­low depth of field is clas­si­cally used to have the girl stand out against the dreamy background.

Lighting/exposure — Back­light­ing was well cho­sen here as the light is quite harsh but the image doesn’t have a very harsh feel. The girl’s face looks well exposed and appears com­fort­able and nat­ural because the sun is not blast­ing it directly. The spec­u­lar high­lights on the hair, hand and around the cloth­ing are won­der­ful warm accents and do not distract.

For all these rea­sons, this is my choice for image of the month. Since we all have opin­ions, some mem­bers may dis­agree with my choice. That’s cool but THIS thread is not the place for debate over my pick, NOR is it the place to fur­ther cri­tique the image. The pur­pose here is to sug­gest strong ele­ments in the photo that we may learn from.

Con­grats again Richard for see­ing and cap­tur­ing this won­der­ful photo!