The Beauty of Norway

Congratulations for this beautiful image! Most people associate Norway with spectacular scenery and winter conditions but the wildlife is also a real attraction all year round. This image captures a truly beautiful and wild animal in very pleasing surroundings. Despite having little time to react and adjust you have nailed the focus and captured a very intense expression of concentration on the face of the fox. There are no distractions in the image and the autumnal colour palette gives a soft and harmonious feeling to the picture. Well done!

Thank you for entering this great image in my contest! Besides all the spectacular scenes and beautiful wildlife you can see in Norway, the country is also a home for millions of people. The daily challenges of living near to the polar circle can often include clearing snow in huge amounts from just about everything.. Scenes like this are beautiful and interesting and can also represent a real pain in the ass for residents. You have captured an authentic moment. I like the framing of the image, filling the whole frame rather than trying to include some sky or other context, this was a good decision in my opinion. I think that the brighter parts of the snow are a little too bright, this can draw the eye away from more important parts of the image and some detail starts to be lost in those areas. Bringing the highlights down in the edit might have made for an even stronger image. Despite that criticism I still feel like you have told a story very effectively with the frame and you deserved your top 10 placing. Well done!

Congratulations for this image! You have made very good use of your high vantage point when framing this image. One great advantage of shooting from far away with a telephoto lens is that you have a huge amount of choices when it comes to what to include in the frame... this is also one of the great difficulties of that kind of shot. In this case I like the composiiton you chose with the main road coming in from the top corner. The snow covered land and the proximity of the open sea highlight the daily conditions of life in the arctic. Well done.

Thank you for entering this image in my Beauty of Norway contest. For every beautiful sunrise or peaceful snow covered morning there are at least ten days like this one, this is an authentic image of a Lofoten day. Many people are drawn to bright, warm and friendly scenes but to me there is also a beauty in the desolation of a day like this where colour and comfort are greatly reduced and the struggle of living in the Arctic is plain to see. These bridges and the iconic mountian make for an exceptional subject and I think that you got a great benefit from struggling up onto the bridge for a higher perspective. In your processing you have retained the feeling of the day and the image. Well done.