Religion

This has the potential to be a really good photograph. The photographer has a keen eye for the power of repetition. However, the devil is in the details! There are some major flaws that distract my eye. The image looks like a low-resolution jpeg. There is a lot of noise and the photograph appears to be out of focus. If these issues were addressed, and also, perhaps, if it were produced in black and white rather than color, this could be an award-winner.

There is great visual power in repetition, and this image has a large dose of it with the tops of the heads and the hands gripping the handrails. And then you have the nice touch of the repetition being broken just a little by the upward glance of the man at top right. He breaks the pattern of everyone else's forward or sideways glances. There is also wonderful contrast between the verticality of all the men and the emphatically horizontal Christ figure. Apart from having a great eye, the photographer also deserves credit for having the forethought to position himself (in what was probably an awkward physical space) to take the photograph. My one major reservation about the image is the way that contrast was handled in post-processing. It's a little too contrasty for my eye. The lighting, on the Christ figure especially, could have been more delicately done, with more attention paid to the highlights. But overall, this is a powerful image.

I love this photograph. It was not easy for me to place it second rather than make it the overall winner. So much about it works well that I don't mind elements that might bother me in other photographs (e.g. the fuzzy focus, the off-square window that could have easily been corrected in photoshop, or the very tight halo - I don't mean the diffuse background illumination - visible around the man's hat and coat). Who would have thought that an image that is about 70% black space could be this good? But of course that is the whole point of it. The Jewish festival of Hanukkah is about small points of lights being signs of hope and renewal in a time of darkness. The contrast between light and dark, hope and suffering, is also echoed in the contrast between the light of the candles and the dark, haunted look on the man's face. I'm guessing that the photographer posed the image - if so, this was handled very well. Although I don't criticise the photographer's decision to give the image a sepia tone, I wonder why this was done, as I think it would have been just as effective in straight black and white. In summary, a beautiful, haunting image. Congratulations!

This photograph is a delight to behold - full of energy and happiness. I have no idea what the religious significance is here - perhaps this should have caused me to not award the image, but I like it so much I am willing to give the photographer the benefit of the doubt! (Note to photographer: it would have been nice if you provided a little bit of contextual information.) The composition looks too perfect for it to have been a truly candid (not posed) photograph, but I don't care about whether it was posed or not. It just works! The diagonal line created by the man reaching out to the child is what makes this photograph work so well. And the 'moment' is just right, with the child poised to receive whatever it is that's in the spoon. The participation in this event of the other two people in the frame (who participate through their engaged glances and smiles) adds energy to what is already a very energised scene. The photographer might have considered i) cropping from the left to remove the man with the white shawl in the background; and ii) straightening the image so that the wooden pillars are not so off the vertical. But these are not major flaws.

The power of this image comes from its simplicity. There are very few visual elements here: the band of water, the cross, the faint outline of the bridge, and the bird. They are all tied together in a very effective composition. The water serves as a nice foundation, the bird in the lower left balances the cross in the upper right, and the line of the bridge mirrors the horizon line. There are a couple of things to which I would have paid more attention: i) I would have cloned out the narrow white halo around the bird (a sharpening artifact?) and ii) I would have bumped up the contrast in the upper two-thirds of the frame just a little in order to strengthen the silhouettes of the cross and the bridge.

The photographer had a good idea here - the simple lonely-looking church in a stark landscape, under an interesting sky certainly conjures up feelings of spirituality. The way the stone wall is incorporated into the composition is also nicely done - the wall works well as a frame within the frame. And the photographer chose to take the photograph at a time of day when the light was dramatic. But there are some important flaws. Most noticeably, the post-processing work has been overdone. The sky looks too heavily retouched. The white halo around the church - a typical artifact either from sharpening or the lighten-shadows/darken-highlights tool in Photoshop - is a significant distraction. The overall level of contrast in the image is jarring. Also, there is a strange-looking black hump on the wall in front of the church that looks like the result of a failed attempt to clone something.

Hands are, of course, very evocative symbols in relation to religion and spirituality, so the photographer has chosen a good subject that in many ways has been presented very effectively. The composition works well - it has great use of negative space and nice positioning of the beads in a way that parallels the girl's upper arm and leads the eye to the hands. However, I have some reservations about the image. I wonder why the photographer chose to not use a sharp focus. I think this would have been more powerful than a blurred and grainy image. Secondly, there's something about the light on the girl's forearm that does not work - the area of the shadow makes her arm look disturbingly thin. And finally, there is something in the lower left-hand corner (I can't tell what it is) that should have been cloned out or cropped out because it distracts the viewer from the hands. Either way, I appreciate what the photographer has attempted here, and the result is close to being a very successful image.

The photographer who produced this image obviously has a good eye. He/she recognized the potential in this scene. My first reaction upon looking at this photograph is to think that it could have been a very strong image - maybe even an award-winner - if only it had been executed differently. All the right elements are present in the right combinations: the muted tones, the contrast of straight lines and curves, the interplay of light and shadow, the absence of people. What needed to be done to make this a great photograph was to reduce the scene down to its essential elements. The view through the arches on the right and left distracts from what is most powerful in this scene. (The fact that the horizon is badly tilted is also a problem.) So I would have loved to see this as a vertically oriented image including only the central arch. And I would have cloned out the minaret-like tower at the right-hand edge of the arch. And even though the colours work well, I might have produced this as a black-and-white photo to accentuate the starkness and simplicity of the scene. Although it would be better to return to the location to take the photo again, all of the adjustments I suggest could be made from the existing exposure. I hope the photographer might try what I have suggested to see if he or she likes the result!

Even though this is obviously a posed photograph, it's lovely nevertheless. How can you resist an image of a pretty little girl in her First Communion outfit? It's nicely composed, the diagonal lines of the pews work well and it's a good example of an image where black and white has more impact than colour. However, some important flaws kept me from giving it an award. There are a lot of dark blotches around the edges, especially on the right side and at the top. I'm guessing that the image was made from a scan of a print, and that the blotches have something to do with that. Also, there is a muddy/foggy look to the image, which I would imagine was not intentional, and is also related to the scanning process. I would have cropped the image from the upper right-hand corner to remove background that does not add to the image and especially to remove the three white reflection spots that are distractions. And I would have shot this with a narrower depth of field so as to blur the background and focus the viewer's attention more emphatically on the girl.

This photograph has the potential to be a strong image. The photographer should be congratulated for having the 'eye' to see this. The colourful boat and shirts of the crew work really well. The sense of having captured a 'moment' filled with energy - these people are about to launch a boat - comes across clearly. The boat being on a diagonal line in the frame adds to the feeling of energy and anticipation. On the other hand, there are some things to which the photographer might have paid more attention to make this an award-winning image. Firstly, the horizon is very far from being horizontal. Secondly, the man in the white shirt (a tourist?) on the left of the image is a major distraction, as is the arm peeking into the left edge of the frame. Thirdly, backlit photographs like this one can be very dramatic, but they pose technical challenges that require attention in post-processing. The flowers and the madonna figure are key elements of the image, but they are too poorly lit to play their proper central roles, and they could have been subtly brightened up in Photoshop. And finally, there is a spot of sensor dust just above the horizon to the left of the madonna's outstretched hand.

The use of colour works well here - the predominance of contrasting purple and gold tones have the makings of a strong image. The fact that the statuette is lit from below is also a plus, giving texture and richness to the small figure. I have difficulty, however, with the intrusiveness of the candles in the composition. Although the candles are helpful for conveying the feel of spirituality, there are so many of them and they are so intensely bright, that they distract my eye from the statuette, which is what should be the centre of attention. The photographer might have considered cropping the image from the bottom to include just a hint of the candles. We don't need to see all of them - just knowing that they are there is sufficient. Cropping to put the statuette off-centre would also have made for an even stronger image.

The photographer has produced an eye-catching composition that makes this photo of a church exterior stand out from the many other church exterior photographs that were submitted to this competition. The camera angle is interesting, effective and full of energy. The balance in the composition is lovely - the lower two-thirds occupied by the church, the upper corner with the tree, and the band of sky separates the two. The tension between the hard geometric lines of the church and the organic natural shapes of the leaves also works very well. The weakness that I see with the photo is that it has been over-processed to the point of distracting the viewer. The leaves have been made too bright, and the sharp halos around the leaves are an obvious sharpening artifact. The sky suffers - I'm guessing - from over-use of the Photoshop lighten-shadows/darken-highlights tool, which probably also explains the diffuse halo around the church building. Remember that with digital photo editing less is more!(Or rather, the appearance of less is more. Sometimes you have to do a lot of work to make a photo appear unedited!)

My initial reaction to this image was "wow", this is the overall winner. There is raw power and emotion here that leap out at you. It is a vision of religious ecstasy. The composition is simple and effective. I have no problem with the man being dead-center in the frame: this is one of those cases where putting the subject at the center works well. The water is a perfect backdrop to the man. The photographer says he shot in burst mode, so he must have had quite a few images to choose from, and this one was a great choice - the look on the man's face, the water flowing from his hands. Perfect! So why then did I not pick this photo as the overall winner, or even put it in my top 10? Because on closer examination it appears that the post-processing was not done as carefully as it should have been. There is an obvious and distracting white border around the man - something to do with the way the transition between processing of the foreground and the background was handled. More importantly, the man's skin looks strangely distorted. When I zoomed in on the image, it appeared to me as though the photographer must have been a little too heavy-handed with one of the photoshop filters. So in summary: this is a photo that has the potential to be an award winner. My advice to the photographer would be to rework it with more care and subtlety in the post-processing.