Total judging points: 24
Judge's Comments:
1. The front of the prominent pitcher plant is sharp, but the back inside surface and the brown pitcher plant in the background and the orange blotches on the out-of-focus stalkson the right seriously distract the eye. Working with post-processing shadows and highlights, some judicious cloning, and sharpening might help this image.
2. I love the overall tonality of this image. The mix of greens and browns is very pleasing, and the exposure is spot on. On closer examination, however, my eye tends to wander around this image, trying to find something in focus. The sharpest point I could see was below and to the right of the lip of the funnel – and that’s not the most interesting part of the image.
Admittedly, in a scene like this where the subject has a lot of dimensionality, it can be difficult with a single point of focus to sharply render everything desired and blur out everything that is not desired, so kudos to the photographer for taking a crack at this. At f/11 the narrow aperture helps reclaim some of the depth-of-field that is lost to shooting at 240mm, but obviously it’s still not enough.
Recognizing that the image would be stronger if the focus were more prominent on the mouth of the funnel, I suggest that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. I would suggest taking advantage of the bokeh introduced by the telephoto by opening up the aperture. This would further reduce the plane of focus, allowing the photographer to blur out the distracting elements in the background more thoroughly. The resulting faster shutter speed would provide a good chance of success in shooting a focus-stacking series in which the entire plant could be rendered in focus while keeping everything else blurred.