Bang!

Here the zoom burst technique has been used to create a very believable impression of the light of the sunset streaming through the bare winter branches of the trees. It also has the effect away from the centre of the image of giving a washed-out feel to the scene, suggesting a mist in the air and contrasting nicely with the dark central tree trunk. I think it's a wonderful example of how this technique can be so much more than a gimmick, and add something genuinely interesting. The photographer has done well to take a simple scene, with an attractive sunset, and use a zoom burst to turn it into something quite memorable. I think the shot may benefit from losing the bright white light on the right hand side.

This is a fabulous embodiment of the title of this month's assignment - 'Bang!' There's such an immense amount of energy emanating from this image, and it's pulled off with great technique and imagination. On their own the gorgeous red and yellow lights would be enough to make a good shot, filling the frame wonderfully. But the inclusion of the shadowy and seemingly staged characters in the centre of the image lifts it another level and adds a welcome degree of interest.

The photographer, Emin Ozkan, describes this as an 'experimental photo shoot' in London. It's certainly the kind of shot that you'd have difficulty imagining beforehand, but Emin has created something special.There are a few elements working together to create a very original image - the measured use of the zoom burst technique to stretch the London Eye, the perfect way in which the subject's mouth and eye remain sharp when the rest of her and the scene has descended into chaos, and the fabulous composition and crop, with the subject positioned perfectly centrally and framed well. A wonderful shot.

I love this shot, and it was one that narrowly missed my Top 10. Some zoom burst shots make your eyes hurt and give the impression that the image is moving in and out. In this case that effect suits the subject perfectly. The sensation I got from looking at this image I could easily imagine being the same one that the child is getting from hanging upside down on the swing, blood going to their head, world turning around them. Technically it's really nicely done, and all our attention is where it should be, on the child's face. I'd be tempted to carefully lighten the bottom left corner of the image with an adjustment layer and mask to bring it in line with the surrounding area.

Wow! I kept returning to this image and marvelling at the creation of such a sculptural array of car lights from a simple motorway at dusk. It's like a fireworks display going off in the middle of the road, red on one side, white on another, and all set to a stunning backdrop of a cloudless sky at dusk. The symmetry of the image is one of the keys to its success, as are the perfect exposure of all the elements, the fabulous gradation of the sky from dying sunset on the left to dark blue on the right, the placement of the cars which are bunched nicely in the top of the image, and the excellent balance between the natural light of the sky and the street lights. Great idea, great execution, and I don't doubt the amount of effort that has gone into this shot.

My winning image for this month's assignment is this stunning piece of work by Richard Dyhouse. The zoom burst technique has been used skilfully, leaving the outline of our beady-eyed friend intact, but at the same time giving the scene a fantastical feel, and bringing the rabbit to life. The central positioning of the eye is perfect, the contrast spot-on, and the wise choice of black and white makes me think that this could be the original White Rabbit dreamt of by Lewis Carroll!

I'm not always a fan of such stylised use of Photoshop, but this shot totally grabbed me. There's a simplicity to it that I love, and the zoom burst has been used sparingly, but enough to give fantastic life to a subject that could have looked quite drab otherwise. The colouring reminds me of old hand-coloured Japanese photography, and it also has the feeling of a burst of light from heaven, just missing a couple of cherubims either side and a madonna with bambino perched underneath!

This shot has done well with the crowd vote, and certainly has a visual impact when you first see it. However the zoom burst effect here is one that has been created in Photoshop rather than within the camera, and for me it needed more subtlety in order to be believable and work well. The extreme contrast between the sharpness of the horse and rider and the surrounding blur is too much for me. And zoom burst when done in-camera would give a circular area of almost-sharpness, rather than this more 'cut-out' shape of the horse's head, the rider's arm, the polo stick etc.

This sublime image by Indonesian photographer Joe Sampouw was an extremely close runner-up this month. I can't think how it could be improved, and it's a fantastic example of a stepped zoom burst technique, effectively creating a series of images over the top of each other at regular intervals. This must have taken a lot of effort and skill to pull off, and Joe has created an image that sucks you in. The colours are beautiful, the subject made enigmatic by the soft focus, and the decision to have a central focal point to the image is a good one.

This is a very subtle use of the zoom burst technique, in fact so subtle that you might equally say that it is a double exposure shot. With the 30 second exposure, the bulk of that time seems to have been given over to the main image of the vase and flowers, with then a shorter amount of time to a more zoomed in, ghostly overlay of the vase alone. This is an understated and gentle scene, beautifully done. The shadows of the flowers on the wall are wonderful and fill out the centre of the image nicely.

I loved this image and wished I'd had a bit more space in my Top 10 to include it. It does have a wonderfully low-budget 1970's Doctor Who feel to it, as Izzy Smart alludes to in her write-up of her shot. The kettle and other everyday kitchen items in the background just add to the charm and weirdness of it rather than feeling like distractions! Experimentation is so important in photography and is one of the quickest ways to learn and find something new and original, and I love what Izzy has done here. I'm not a big fan of the almost-square crop. I find it lacks the strength of a square crop, so if it had been mine I'd have cropped a bit from one or both of the sides.

This image had me laughing out loud. The child's bulging and seemingly worried eye staring out at us through the magnifying glass. When it seems that so much photography is about showing off how darling our off-spring are, it can be fun to subvert this and show them in a less flattering and comical light from time to time. From a technical perspective the use of the zoom burst is possibly a little heavy, but more worrying for me was the huge volume of dust on this camera's sensor. Get to the camera store Matt! All those little black dots can come off in one swipe of a sensor swab. Even when your sensor is mainly clean, it's still good practise when preparing your image to give it the once over at 100% on your screen and use the healing brush or clone tool to remove any marks like this before signing the image off.

The zoom burst technique does a great job of implying movement in the subjects, and so is well suited to this gang of walkers heading onwards. I liked the central placement of the subjects, and the square crop, but felt that the zoom burst technique was used a little too heavily, and that the slight over-brightness of the exposure was distracting.

This image by Natalie Tonking has a lot of visual appeal, and I'm sure took some effort to get the stepped zoom burst technique working so well. It's a fantastic subject for using this technique on. Great photography though requires attention to lots of small details, and taking the time to perfect something that already might look good enough to most. In this case I would love to have seen the whole of the pattern within the frame of the image, rather than having it burst out of the frame in an inconsistent way. And looking around the edges of the image there is a very distracting yellow light in the bottom right corner that would have been easily cloned out in Photoshop. I would have actually been tempted to remove all the lights in the image other than the main central one, to reduce distractions.