Photography forum image of the month August 2011

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.

My Lit­tle Friend by Wicked Dark

This Month’s choice is  (click to see the large ver­sion of this image) My Lit­tle Friend by Wicked Dark.

I chose this image for sev­eral reasons:

Sharp­ness — It’s dif­fi­cult to get this level of sharp­ness when doing macro work and the sharp­ness on the crawler here is won­der­ful and very strik­ing! On the oppo­site end the back­ground out of focus ele­ments also work well to iso­late the pri­mary subject.

Com­po­si­tion — All eyes are on the bug here and this is due to good com­po­si­tion with almost no dis­trac­tions. The curved part of the crawler is well seen due to the comp and the diag­o­nal branch at right act as a frame and helps keep our eyes on the most impor­tant element.

Colour/Lighting — The image busts with colour due to shoot­ing in softer light along with some (likely) pro­cess­ing to enhance the greens.

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 Wicked Dark for cap­tur­ing this strik­ing crawler.