Open

This open-palmed gesture of an old man’s upturned hands tells us as much about him as his portrait ever could. The richly veined, muscular fingers are evidence of a lifetime of hard manual work. The severed thumb shows the sacrifice this man has suffered in the dangerous pursuit of earning a living. Your photo is a poignant, heartfelt and beautifully observed study of a man’s life, seen through his hands as if they were an open book.

This static rear end of a Sikorsky helicopter’s fuselage and its mannequin dressed in Air Force fatigues is a sharply-taken, fine-detailed photo. But your Cosford RAF museum photo comes to life by your inspired choice to place it against a moving sky background. It suddenly gives the stationary, swivel-mounted machine gun a sense of wartime realism as if it really was open for business.

This is a beautifully balanced composition of open-winged gannets flying through the wide open seascape off Bass Rock in Scotland’s Firth of Forth. You’ve managed to catch the seabirds equally dispersed throughout the composition with the main focus on the large gull in the foreground at the moment of take off. What I particularly like is that the North Sea horizon adds a linear stability to the busy flight movement throughout your photo.

Your shot of multicoloured windows in the historic police barracks in Singapore would do well in any architectural photo challenge. But what makes your photo stand out in this competition is that you’ve managed to catch the building at the moment when every single window has been left wide open. Perhaps the top left hand corner could have been skewed ever so slightly to ensure that all the upright lines were parallel but that doesn’t take away from a remarkably well-spotted interpretation of the brief.

Of all the open-mouthed entries of animals and birds I chose your humorous version taken at San Diego zoo in California’s Balboa Park. The side-on view of the hippopotamus swallowing water from an unknown source is ironical, because despite being submerged chin deep in water, the animal chooses to swallow the jet of spray rather than drink from the water in which he’s wallowing. Your selected choice of aperture and ISO has resulted in a perfectly frozen zoological frame.

I like the image crop of these openly stacked books. It looks as if the two wise old books are filtering their knowledge through to the new book sandwiched between them. The compressed book pages are reminiscent of birds taking flight with their open wings caught in varying degrees of flapping feathers. Using an open still life book is a much covered subject but displaying three together is what makes your sharply-taken photo triply novel.

The stars of your completely different take are the two old ladies enjoying themselves cutting a ribbon to open a local community church cafe. In the best tradition of street photography you successfully took your one chance to capture the moment at precisely the right time. Your zoom lens has caught the action from the perfect standpoint in front of the pensioners. I love the reaction of the celebratory crowd behind the scissor wielding lady but I can’t help wondering what the photograph looked like taken by the lady in the centre of your composition - especially as it would have included you taking your top ten judged picture.

You tell us very little about your photograph other than it was taken in Madagascar. Your photo of bare-footed children running towards the camera looks as if it was taken inside a bamboo-fenced village settlement. We don’t know why or what has made the youngsters so excitedly happy but it’s their contagious joy that carries over to the viewer. It’s plain to see that their welcoming open arms are eager to hug the person (or persons) they are sprinting towards. This is a beautifully captured and very original interpretation of the brief.

This very strong pop art composition of open-mouth clowns made me smile. Called ‘The Laughing Clowns’ the object of the funfair game is to throw ping-pong balls inside their mouths whilst they are swivelling from side-to-side. The use of a low resolution and a wide-angle lens has resulted in a strong depth of field. It keeps the right hand face in focus leading us neatly through the parade of pierrots ending up at the sideshow’s blurred owner sitting in the top left-hand corner. Your unique subject matter happily brings to mind Manfred Mann’s ‘Ha! Ha! Said The Clown’ so thank you for sending them in.