Beachcombing
by EBJones

Comment:
There's something to be said about wood converted to black and white that it aesthetically pleasing.

I'm not really a fan of the border to be honest as it draws to much attention away from your image. I'd also like to see either more depth of field or less. The drift wood in the background isn't quite out of focus enough.

Trio-Wings
by mrbig65

Comment:
Not really sure what I am looking at. I believe there are plants in snow (?). If so this is quite underexposed. There are also some spots that could be cloned out.

The composition is nice however and the thumbnail reminded me of asian text which really would well with this challenge

Sunday Reading: Mark 6
by northebound

Comment:
I'd have to agree with previous commenters. This light is really harsh and you have a lot of blown highlights. The fact that they are mainly in the text of the Bible makes them glaringly obvious unfortunately. The highlights on the left hand are blown out but its not quite so jarring.

Of course there is a but...

The cross you were trying to convey in the image was a great idea. Trying to get a defined shadow AND have nice soft light? yeesh.... I think that's a lighting problem that may be unsolvable at least using natural light. Maybe a reflector to provide some fill to the areas outside of the direct sunlight to balance out a bit and hopefully your scene would be less contrasty. It would probably involve a different pose and composition though.

To be honest, I think that the exposure lost you marks and the idea you were trying to pull off actually brought your score up.

Keep up the good work and keep the ideas coming.

Girls just wanna have fun
by Maggye

Comment:
This really needed to use the full image size allowed (800 px on the longest size).

Focus
by avalanche1030

Comment:
When my dog saw one of my balloons on the floor he went absolutely nuts. He kept barking at it and trying to play with it. Everytime he went near it the air currents would move it and he would start all over again.

Ain't pets and balloons fun? :)

Zoom
by Prime_Time

Comment:
great abstract images that subtly meets the challenge.

UP
by Art Roflmao

Comment:
Great idea but the processing kills it unfortunately. Oversharpening has created halos and the saturation has been pushed too much

"Tree" Balance Training
by Coley

Comment:
lots of selective desaturated images. This is one of the best I've seen so far

Acrobatic
by Techo

Comment:
um...wow. Going to need to see the details on this one.

love triangle
by posthumous

Comment:
Greetings from the Critique Club!

As previous commenters have indicated the image is pretty soft as you probably already know. This likely due to the aggressive cropping you did. With an image like this I think you can say its just okay ...or
...work with what you have. Its a soft image. Maybe try to actually soften it even more to make it more abstract yet keeping the shapes of the birds recognizable. You could even just blur every but the birds to give the appearance of sharpness to them.

Judging from the sky it was fairly overcast though you shot at the right time or day (either early morning or just before dusk). Maybe changing the white balance would have warmed up the image making this more inviting and working with the love bird theme you were working for.

I think that to get the strong silhouette you were going for you needed to get closer so you wouldn't need to crop and your focus would have been better. To get closer and have all three birds in the frame would have required patience and a little luck.

In terms of the challenge I think this one was pretty open so your image certainly met the challenge pretty well and wasn't a shoe horn in any sense.