*** Mini Challenge #711 - Your Favourite Photos ***

I recently did a similar MCover on the powershot forum, and it was pretty popular. Hope you guys will enjoy it.

This MC is for your favourite photos.

Any subject, any camera, any processing, etc. Just so long as you consider the photo one of your favourites, perhaps making the top 10% of your photo collection (if you calculate percentages - I don't). Don't worry, you don't have to commit to calling a photo your absolute best.

This MC will close on August 19 at 18:00 (6pm) GMT.

I won't provide any examples as favourites are (obviously) a very personal thing. Remember, you're not aiming for a particular style or subject, whatever you like you submit.

Challenge Rules:

The host gives you a topic and you post up to three images that fit. Remember, it's all about fun, sharing, and learning. Any picture you have taken in person is eligible, regardless of the time taken, camera, or post-processing used. The host chooses the winners and honorable mentions and posts those in a new thread. The host's decision is final. The winner of this challenge then hosts the next challenge, judges the winner of that one, and so on it goes. The winner of this challenge will have 48 hours to post the next challenge. If that doesn't happen, 2nd place will have 24 hours to do so, then it's up to 3rd place.

Submission Posting Guidelines:

Post each one of your three submissions in its own reply to this post. Give each post a unique Subject, please. It is best to embed an image in its post rather than linking to somewhere else. Feel free to post photos "for exhibition only" if you want to share more than three, or won't be available to host the next challenge. Try to preserve the EXIF please, so we can see which camera, lens, and settings were used.

Comment Posting Guidelines:

Feel free to post comments on the images or ask for comments. Don't hesitate to click on the green "Like" thumb on the top right of the post, so we know which images were most popular. Likes are appreciated as much as constructive criticism is. The host can make up his or her own mind without being influenced by that. I wish you all "good luck" and let's see some interesting pics.

Recent Mini-Challenges:

710: Small

709: Eye of the Beholder
708: Old Buildings
707: Big
706: Long Exposure
705: Many Colors
704: Abstraction
703: Sunsets
702: Living Things
701: Not of the Earth
700: Nostalgia: Your Early Digital Camera Pictures
699: Picture of a Picture
698: Happy Faces
697: Music
696: Birds
695: Nature
694: Boats
693: Metal
692: There's "nothing" to shoot!
691: Favorites
690: Nostalgia
689: Winter
688: Travel/Vacation
687: Festive Lights
686: Animals
685: Plants
684: Night Scenes
683: Small machines (for work and leisure)
682: Autumn
681: Wabi-Sabi
680: Landscapes
679: One Dominant Color

Hopefully I haven't been too vague. Enjoy! I look forward to seeing your entries.

Autumn on the Gunnison River, Colorado

Denali National Park, Alaska

Comet Neowise

That's a very nice trio Richard, I particularly like no.1. It's so picturesque, like a painting.

All three are very nice Richard.  Actually they are great photos.

Don

Thank you so much

Thank you very much for the kind words, Don

rjgjr wrote:

Comet Neowise

That's really nice, Don. Any details on scope, camera, processing, etc.?

Thanks.

Len Philpot wrote:

rjgjr wrote:

Comet Neowise

That's really nice, Don. Any details on scope, camera, processing, etc.?

Thanks.

Thank you Phil. I shot this in the White Mountains of California at an elevation of about 10,000’. I used my Canon T6i with a 70-300L lens. I put it on a tripod mounted iOptron Star Tracker, 20 frames at 30 seconds and stacked them. Cropping it quite a bit, I was surprised at how well it still came out. Neowise was definitely a once or twice in a lifetime experience.

I just assumed you used a telescope, cooled camera and astro-style post (PixInsight, etc.). Very nice.

rjgjr wrote:

Thank you Phil. I shot this in the White Mountains of California at an elevation of about 10,000’. I used my Canon T6i with a 70-300L lens. I put it on a tripod mounted iOptron Star Tracker, 20 frames at 30 seconds and stacked them. Cropping it quite a bit, I was surprised at how well it still came out. Neowise was definitely a once or twice in a lifetime experience.

I've had a Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Pro Pack for more than a year now and have yet to even take it out in the field. It took a long time to ship and during that time my bubble of astrophotography enthusiasm waned. I'd still like to do it, but here in the low, humid deep south US it's so warm / wet that the already-significant learning cliff and inherent difficulty of astro-imaging is overlain with a VERY limited "shooting season". Given a general rule of thumb to have ambient temperature at or below 60F (to avoid thermal noise from a DSLR), I'm pretty much limited to only the most dew-prone times of the year. And certainly no summer shooting.

I've been a visual astronomer for 35 years, but never done imaging. So I had spent time learning about flat frames, bias frames, dark frames, dark flat frames, stretching, star shrinking, gradient removal, yada, yada, yada... only to have weather intervene, time pass and now I'd have to start all over again.

We'll see...   

This is my favorite photo, I think.

I have it as the lock screen on my cell phone.

Every time I open the phone, this road is leading me into what's inside.

Steve Thomas

stevet1 wrote:

This is my favorite photo, I think.

I have it as the lock screen on my cell phone.

Every time I open the phone, this road is leading me into what's inside.

Steve Thomas

Steve, looks cool.

I can see why you like it. 

I think the creamy bokeh makes this Red-Breasted Nuthatch one of my favourites

I loved the way the sunlight filtered through the trees onto the White-faced Monkey's face

Iceland's waterfalls were impressive, but the colour and terrain of the landscape lures me to return

Don

This is an excellent theme for an MC but for me it's very difficult.

I don't really have any truly favorite images (that I've shot). Some are relatively better or worse than others, but none 'measure up' in my eyes. I've just gone through several hundred and nothing has stood out. In fact many are downright cringeworthy now. Maybe I've just become more critical as I continue to see more (good) shots in general.

Hmmm.....

I can see why you like Iceland's terrain.

That's a cool monkey. 

Len Philpot wrote:

This is an excellent theme for an MC but for me it's very difficult.

I don't really have any truly favorite images (that I've shot). Some are relatively better or worse than others, but none 'measure up' in my eyes. I've just gone through several hundred and nothing has stood out. In fact many are downright cringeworthy now. Maybe I've just become more critical as I continue to see more (good) shots in general.

Hmmm.....

I'm sorry, you obviously don't have to enter if you don't want to.

One of your more superior shots, maybe?

Oh, my comments weren't a troll for sympathy... just difficulty in selecting any of my images that I think are truly good. 

I'll see what I can find.

Here are some that I like in some ways, although all of them have issues. All but one are victims of Topaz Adjust under the heavy hand of an operator who at the time knew only to push buttons. LOL All of these are from more than a decade ago.

West Texas roadside hill

I can't be sure offhand, but I think this hill is called Carpenter Mountain, near Fort Davis, Texas. The image, and some of the others, was processed (usually at 800x600) for display on PBase when I was a member of the Digital Rebels Yahoo group a decade+ ago. There are plenty of things needing fixing (re-shooting!) but there's something about it I like. Not sure exactly what, just the way it feels.

Tuly Canyon on TX 118 northwest of Fort Davis, Texas

Another Topaz victim, but I like the feel and in person the vista is something I can look at for hours. It's just soooo different from where I live.

Irons Fork Lake, Acorn, Arkansas

The only Topaz-free image in this bunch... It was a beautiful November evening and the lake was glass-smooth. Looking at it now, I'd tweak cropping / composition a bit and try to recover a tad more shadow detail, but I like the feel. Given this was shot with a Rebel XT / 350D, there's probably no shadow detail to be recovered!

Exhibit Images

Big distant sunset thunderhead over the southwest Texas landscape

Looking from TX 166, the Davis Mountains Scenic Loop, back toward the southeast just after the sun dropped below the western horizon.

Central Louisiana farm panorama

A heavy Topaz Adjust preset turned the Louisiana sky into something neat here. No, the land doesn't roll the way it looks - That's just the result of an uneven hand-held pano. Louisiana is green, but not that green And the skies aren't anywhere near that blue. Ever. (ever) But it looks kinda neat in a surreal way. The 'circular' thunderhead is what caught my attention.