The guidelines for this assignment were to post an image of something that provides food for your soul, recharges you, and makes you whole again. Thank you to everyone that participated, I enjoyed seeing your images, and learning what "recharges" you.
Thank you to everyone that voted for my
Garden of the Gods image for
People's Choice. This image, and the morning I spent photographing there have special meaning to me. As I left Garden of the Gods and began my 1400 mile drive to Reno, Nevada for the North American Nature Photographer's conference, I had thoughts and emotions welling up inside me that I wanted to share with you all. I should have pulled over to the side of the road and written down those thoughts, because now that so much time has past they no longer have the urgency they had on that day. Next time I vow to write down my thoughts before the emotion ebbs. Someday I will find the time to write about how important it is for my soul to remain connected to nature, and how photography helps facilitate that connection.
Garden of the GodsPeople's ChoicePhotographed by Keith
I enjoyed Rebecca's
Snowman image, and can imagine her smile of pure child-like joy as she built the snowman. Imagining that smile makes me fall in love with her all over again.
SnowmanPhotographed by Rebecca
I enjoyed Lars' image of
Mother Nature's Food for the Soul as well, and could imagine myself walking along the path by the water. I'm glad Lars included the path in his composition, because without it, it would be much harder to imagine myself in that beautiful location. I might have tried to compose this image by shifting a little bit to the right to avoid cutting off the rock in the lower left corner (by eliminating it from the composition), and including just a bit more of the curve of the path in the far distance.
Mother Nature's Food for the SoulPhotographed by Lars
I have a new wide-gamut display, and the phonograph cartridge in Lars'
Food for the Mind image has a super saturated "day-glow" pink color on that monitor. I noticed the image didn't have an embedded color profile, and when I opened the image in Photoshop and assigned a profile of AdobeRGB the image looked much more natural. Now that more and more people are acquiring wide gamut monitors, it will be even more important for us to embed a color profile in our images, otherwise they will be super-saturated when displayed on a wide-gamut display.
Food for the MindPhotographed by Lars
Sue's image of
Mom's Chocolate Chip Cookies, made my mouth water, so it definitely was a successful image. The cookie in the center of the frame is sharply defined; however the cookie in the background is in that "partially in focus" range that I find distracting. You should strive to have your background be in focus (smaller aperture) or smoothly out of focus (larger aperture). The reality is that it is tough to get much depth of field when you are photographing with a 150mm focal length at close range. I doubt if going down to an aperture of f16 would have given enough depth of field, so that leaves shooting at a larger aperture as your only option. A lens with a "tilt" function would work well in this situation, as would "focus stacking" as discussed in the front page article on the site, or you could use a larger aperture and blur the background so that it is softer and less distracting. But these are only suggestions on how to make an already successful image even better.
Mom's Chocolate Chip CookiesPhotographed by Sue Pepin
Rick was smart to stack the nut bars in his
Cranberry Nut Bars image, since this enabled him to place the cranberry nut bars within the depth of field of his selected lens and aperture and obtain an acceptably sharp reproduction of the important parts of his composition. This image has great color and contrast, and acceptable sharpness. Good job Rick.
Cranberry Nut BarsPhotographed by Rick Pepin
I liked the arrangement of elements within Sheila's
Food for my Soul image, although I couldn't quite figure out how she did it.
Food for My SoulPhotographed by Sheila Anchetta
Thank you to everyone that participated in this assignment, and thank you for sharing what makes you "tick."
Viewers are encouraged to respond to this thread describing why you like a particular image, or think it was particularly successful at meeting the guidelines of the assignment.
Keith
