Judging photographic competitions is extremely difficult and as hard as judges try to remove their own personal preferences from the judging process and rely on cold, hard technical details it is impossible. So in a competition where any one of a number of images could have made 1st place I eventually settled on this image.
What appeals to me is it's simplistic beauty, a fractured cloud hanging gracefully in the sky against colourful background. I have no doubt that the colours were enhanced in post processing but they have been applied with great care leaving us with an image that is genuinely believable. A scene that any one of us could venture out at sunrise or sunset and see in the sky above us.
With the advent of RAW processing applications and image manipulation tools comes great power, the power to enhance our images, to take them from the natural to the 'super' natural ....... and even beyond. When this power is harnessed and applied with great care it can take an ordinary image and turn it in to something extraordinary.
Picking my top image was extremely difficult as there were so many excellent contenders and I could have made a case for all of them but in the end the subtle beauty of this image was my choice.
Really well done to the photographer and my congratulations on producing such a beautiful image.
305 Images entered
Brief
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**This contest is open to photographers ranked between 1 and 250 in this week’s <a href="https://www.photocrowd.com/photographer-community/">Leaderboard</a>.** Given the display that our skies put on so regularly, it’s surprising how rarely photographers find themselves drawn to shoot just the sky, with no land or sea in shot. How does our perception and appreciation of the sky change when it is unanchored from the ground? We’ll find out in this first weekly outing for the new Expert Judged ‘Ranked’ contests. Images should be shot during the daytime please, including sunset and sunrise, and not be night shots or astrophotography. <b> For the avoidance of doubt, images should not contain any land, sea or land-based nature or structures. </b>
We usually photograph subjects that appeal to us but to be a successful image and appeal to others it has to evoke a memory or emotion in the viewer. What do you see when you look at this image?
I see an angel or phoenix rising from the clouds, its powerful wings spreading across the sky ready to beat down and power its escape.
This perfectly demonstrates how photographers can use the features of a landscape to tell a story that fire's the viewers imagination.
In a competition full of colourful clouds this image really stood out for its ability to ignite the viewers imagination and build up a story around the details the photographer has captured and shown to us.
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Another lovely image that really captures the beauty of clouds.
The photographer has identified exactly what part of the vast sky they want to capture, had a clear vision of what their final image would look like, captured the scene perfectly and then cropped the image to suit their subject. They have also resisted the temptation to over process the image and allow the innate elegance of the clouds to shine through.
When an image has been as carefully crafted as this one has it just demands a place in the Top 10.
This image is one that demonstrates the benefits of framing our images.
This is something that is extremely difficult when photographing the wide expanse of the sky and clouds which don't always lend themselves to being framed. Without some kind of visual barrier in our frame to enclose our main subject the composition can become a little 'loose'. The photographer has done a excellent job here to use the clouds to form a frame around the main subject of the crepuscular rays shining up from the bottom right of the image.
I am so pleased to see that the photographer has resisted the urge to sharpen the image, clouds are naturally soft and fluffy without any hard edges. When we sharpen clouds we turn them into something hard and un-natural looking.
The photographer has seen a spectacular sight, framed the image perfectly using the natural drama of the scene to excite the viewer rather than boost contrast, sharpening and saturation.
Really well done.
Patterns in the landscape make for great subject for us photographers, to take the chaos of nature and make some kind of coherent pattern from them is a real art.
Here the photographer has mirrored the line of clouds in the sky with a line of long grass on the ground. The two lines run diagonally through the frame almost mirroring each other, it is this that really drew me to this image. Technically it stretches the boundary of what is essentially a competition about the sky and clouds but we can allow this as the two compliment each other perfectly.
The exposure has been handled perfectly, occasionally these type of images are blended - the sky exposure and the ground exposure are taken separately and then blended together in an application like Photoshop.
Another very small detail that I like is the building on the horizon on the left, it acts almost like a (what us judges call) a visual stop. An object placed close to the edge of the frame to stop the viewers eye from wandering out of the frame. In this image it could do with being cropped in a little from the left to make more use of this building. What I particularly like is the little bump of cloud above the building in what is otherwise a flat bank of cloud. It is little details like this that provide additional interest for the viewer, once they have spotted this their eye then wanders around the image looking for more little details.
A lovely beautifully executed image.
