Rise and shine duck
by kurtmooreoh

Comment by JulietNN:
HI from the C Club

That would be a female mallard, nice birds.

Your focus is not so sharp on the bird, the focus seem to be on the plank of wood just in front of her. A tighter L crop right up to her tail may have helped with this shot. Play around with zooming in and out with your camera. in post processing some sharpening would have gone a long way with this, play around with the brightness shadow and curves and see if that doesn't add to this shot too

Stunt Road
by kurtmooreoh

Comment by Trompie:
Nice idea; just the tower in the backround is distracting.

Stunt Road
by kurtmooreoh

Comment by Kempostudent3:
Nice capture of the action. It's a shame the background is so white and uninteresting. It almost seems to blow out the picture for me.

Stunt Road
by kurtmooreoh

Comment by Alex_Europa:
You should've been where that other photographer is!!!!

The cycle of life
by kurtmooreoh

Comment by basssman7:
Greetings from Ernie of the Critique Club!

Subject: Is the subject the flowers (the challenge topic) or the bees?

Composition: Unfortunately it seems to be quite centered and is not totally sharp. (the focus appears to be soft)

Technicals (exposure, noise etc): The image appears to have a great deal of noise (digital grain) which detract from the photo. It is almost like this is a highly cropped piece of an image. It also appears to be a bit too highly saturated. The orange of the flower seems to be almost unnatural.

Improvements: I noticed in the exif information on your photo that you used your digital zoom while taking this? It is never a good idea to use a point and shoot camera's digital zoom. Essentially all it does is crop your image to make it appear to be closer up. If you wanted to do that you could do so yourself in your image editing program afterwords and yet have much more precise control of the crop. If you then further cropped the image as you state in your comments then that would explain the noise in the image. You are actually using a very small portion of the original frame. I think the photo enhance application of Iphoto has oversaturated the colours here.

My suggestion would be to spend about an additional $70 and buy a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements as your software for editing. It is available for a Mac and it can do about 85% of what the full version of PS can do, but at a fraction of the price. :)

Good luck. I look forward to seeing more of your images in the future.

Rise and shine duck
by kurtmooreoh

Comment by Tammster:
The bright sun & shadows didn't help this picture. It's also slightly blurry (and doesn't seem to be on purpose).

Rise and shine duck
by kurtmooreoh

Comment by hotpasta:
over exposed unfortunately

Rise and shine duck
by kurtmooreoh

Comment by Yo_Spiff:
Seems almost a snapshot to me, I'm afraid. The sunrise color is very strong and the subject does not seem to stand out against the background. Some blown highlights on the wall in the background are a problem as well. Some selective editing is possibly called for here. I wonder how a b/w version of this might look. I often do that when the colors don't work.

The cycle of life
by kurtmooreoh

Comment by Rasai:
The bees became subject~instead of the flower...OOF too.

The cycle of life
by kurtmooreoh

Comment by GregoryB:
Seems that the focus point is a little behind the main subject matter.