Thanks Tom I totally agree on all points and just want to say thank you for stopping by, I do appreciate all your comments. :)peace to you, gail

i'm impressed that you are shooting in the snow -- i probably would be bundled up in front of a fire -- well, if we ever had snow. anyway, i like this, and the falling snow lends a beautiful touch. sometimes it's impossible to get nature to line up exactly as we would like and easier to see what we should have done afterwards. fortunately, we have people like Sean to point out things that could make the next ones better....

I agree with Sean. I like this shot and in this weather with snow you did well. Quite different than my shooting dead things not in snow and with light:-)

I don't think this is a failure at all. True there isn't any dramatic lighting here but IMHO its not a bad thing, in fact with snow we are trained to expect this type of lighting. My favorite parts of the image are the snowflakes and the way the color graduates from tan/brown to a rich blue/gray at the top this also gives the main subject a kind of halo. Here is what I feel could improve the image, the main seed pod is isolated quite well in the stem but at the top we have another pod (OOF) growing out of it, which distracts from the main one. What I mean by this, is that the main seed pod needs to be more isolated. This unfortunately is pretty hard to correct after the fact. maybe with some judicial cloning (a ton of work), it might work. I really like the image sans the OOF seed pod growing out of the main subject.

This is OK. I think Nonda usually uses "light" to set off her dead stuff. Am not sure, but light can really make a winner, IMO. I like this better than the phone poles. I will let her critique that one. The lines/poles are too light, not sure what should be done, though. ginger