The Occult

Thanks to all of you for entering the competition and for submitting such a wide variety of different entries. I enjoyed looking at them all and as with most of my competitions had trouble choosing a top ten such was the quality of the entries.

This is my winning entry and I absolutely love it, appealing as it does to my silly sense of humour.

It is of course witty but is also a very well worked and beautifully composed composite. The mannequin and ghost have been added to the scene with skill and are perfectly placed in the frame with the path leading the eye from the foreground figure to the ghost and the graveyard beyond.

You say this was a project to improve your compositing skills and you have certainly achieved that goal. Keep up the good work and congratulations on your first place.

There were quite a few still life images submitted to the competition but this one caught my attention early on and stayed in my top ten throughout the judging process.

It’s a clean and simple image, well composed and lit and the vignette works well to concentrate the viewers attention on the parts of the image that matter. The subject matter is most interesting and in fact inspired me to do a little on-line research and reading on rune stones and runic languages.

Congratulations on your top ten placing.

What a strange and unusual image this is, with an enigmatic title to accompany it and introduce it to the viewer.

Having done a little googling I now know that “Sui Reflexionem” is Latin for self-reflection and so presumably this image is a pictorial representation of who you are and how you believe you present yourself to the world.

Maybe better for the occult theme if the goat had horns but either way this is a pleasing and complex image that each viewer will interpret in their own way.

Thank you for submitting such a different entry from the norm and congratulations on a top ten placing.

Eeeek she has no feet ...... spooky indeed.

This is another well worked image that is genuinely quite scary. I’m not sure if ghosts would really cast a shadow but without it the image would look wrong. Besides, the inclusion of the shadow really lifts the ghost from the background and thrusts her into the viewers attention.

Another well deserved top ten placing.

Now this image I find genuinely unsettling and spooky in the extreme. I love that low contrast washed out look and this combined with the monochrome presentation gives the picture a timeless quality. The fact that her face is almost totally obscured adds an air of mystery and to be honest the bits of her face that are showing aren’t easily recognisable as facial features.

Is she real or is she a ghost? Either way it’s a marvellous image and well worthy of a top ten placing.

Sex and death is a heady combination that has inspired artists through the ages.

This is a beautiful image on that theme, colourful, artistic, stylish and just so very different to all the other images submitted to the competition.

Bravo for being so different and congratulations on your top ten placing.

Oh my, what a fabulous church this is and I really would like to get in there with my tripod and a full camera battery.

There were several images submitted of this location, presumably by the same photographer, but this for me is the best of those images. The monochrome presentation works well for me and the wide panorama style crop shows the ghosts in their environment rather than just concentrating on one or two ghosts alone.

A congregation of spectres ...... wow.

There were a lot of ghostly images submitted to the competition and this is one of my favourites.

The monochrome presentation is most fitting and the background image is a fine picture in its own right. In my mind it’s a derelict hospital or mental asylum, at least that’s where I would expect ghosts to wander anyway.

The strong perspective leads the eye through the image and the ghosts have been added most expertly. They are neither so opaque that they look like real people nor so transparent that they are hard to make out. If ghosts exist then this I’m sure is exactly how they’d look.

Congratulations on a superb image.

I love the simplicity of this image and what a fantastic setting the door and steps provide.

The figure certainly has a presence, she’s quite spooky and I like the way you have added a vignette to keep the image enclosed.

I don’t believe for a second that she’s a witch though ..... where are her pointy hat, broomstick and black cat :)