Bokeh and nature

To find a winner between all these submissions was no easy process and it was a very close one. First I must admit: I love puffins! But that wouldn't be enough for the win because I love many of the subjects in the photos submitted. What convinced me here was a balanced composition and - you can guess - this wonderful bokeh! The puffin has been embedded perfectly into the surrounding vegetation and shot from a very low pov and with using 400mm and an aperture of 7.1 plus the right distance between the bluebells and the puffin the bluebells get very blurred and give this dreamy impression.

I really like the technical perfection of this shot with its sharpness and its colors and the color composition. With another brief concentrating not on bokeh but a macro competition would have seen this photo further up the list. The bokeh is not special enough to make it a winner here, but that's just the matter of the brief. The photographer is very talented and knows what he is doing. Congrats for this shot.

This bokeh with all its circled from - I would say - light shining through dew drops in the background - is a very exciting one. It's an eye catcher. The spider is well placed in this picture. I love the colors and this bokeh. Perhaps I would prefer the spider in a different angle as it is seen a little bit from behind and a perspective looking directly on her back could be better, but probably this wasn't possible without losing that beautiful background bokeh. Great shot nevertheless!

This photo brings back to my mind how difficult it has been to find a decision about the winners in this competition. The beautiful kestrel is well placed and it's not only a harmonic composition it is also a perfect color composition. The soft structures you can still see in the background bokeh are much more interesting then a completely blurred one. This photo would have deserved the win as well - the only thing the other two photos had more was the bokeh part.

This photo has made me smile and I bet I'm not the only one. A great shot with a splendid bokeh. Lynx are just beautiful animals and the photographer did a very good job to put it in scene. The one and only thing I could criticize here is that there could probably have been found a better composition which could work out even better than putting the lynx into the center of the frame. Besides that: congrats for this shot!

The pulsatilla pratensis is a lovely flower and here in this photo it gets comforted with a very harmonic composition and an interesting bokeh generated by a low point of view, evening light coming through the trees and the characteristics of an old lens like the Jupiter 200/4. With a relatively aperture the scene gets blurred enough so it doesn't distract the eye from the focused flowers but it is still interesting and you can still get a feeling of the surrounding area. My congratulations for this shot!

There's something special about this shot. With it's blurred snow drop in the background bokeh it is telling some kind of intriguing story - something like two snow drops talking about a third one. I like it when images tell stories and this one was a very near miss concerning the top 10. Certainly it could be only me but I have a little problem with the right image border with the snow drop coming out of nowhere which distracts my eye from the whole story a little. But - this shot shows a very nice bokeh and and a special mood. Congrats for this!

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