Greatest Nature Photographs of All Time

http://news.discovery.com/animals/greatest-nature-photographs-of-all-time-featured-in-earth-day-auction.html

I don't know if you can legitimately claim to isolate the "greatest photographs of all time." At least this claim is attached to a worthy cause for Earth Day. There are some great photos though.

The first one is the mirrored polar bear. It's so deceptive at first glance. I love it.

The sea lion one reminds me of a music video with performers taking turns coming at the camera.

I don't really like the cloud one. Even though I respect that the photographer waited for the cloud to get into the perfect position, I think the contrast is too severe between the clouds and boulders, and the boulders are almost unidentifiable.

The fighting polar bears is very striking. They look like human children in awkward stances.

I'm not a big fan of the river one. I can't really criticize anything specific about it. It may be that I've been more attracted to wildlife images lately.

The same thing applies to the petrified sand dunes. Although I like the colors.

I love the pattern the tortoises form leading us up through the photo.

The shark one is just sad.

The water lilies are beautiful, reaching up toward the light.

My favorite is the elephant photo. The color saturation holds me in that photo for a long time. The reflection is great and having the moon in there is always a plus. I also really like the elephant to the left staring out of the picture.

Show Photo

55 mm
f/5.6
1/500 s
ISO: 320

Algoritmic Inferencing of Natural Images

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~wangz/project/imsearch/Aesthetics/ICIP08/datta.pdf

Photo.net
DPChallenge
Terragalleria
Alipr

The authors of the study collected data from these four websites that let users rate the quality and aesthetics of photographs. They applied this data to aesthetic algorithms. Three questions were used to accumulate the data:
Score Prediction: Rating the photo 1 to 10, or 1 to 7
Class Prediction: High or Low, Professional or Snapshot
Emotion Prediction: Amusing, scary, boring, pleasing, irritating

There's a lot of light here, diagonal lines, and I tried to put that bare log on a third line.

There's light on that ridge, the hill is big with some jagged lines, and the shore and horizon are on third lines.

The berries are red and on a third line, there's light on the snow, and there's difference in the snow and leaves.

I shot the leaves because they're red and I wanted to make them sharper in the foreground.

The log is different, big, sharp, and on a third line.

Wildlife

http://tanyabright.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/Primates/G0000Oy3cfODTlMw/I0000k.EnzfMyX0Y

I've found myself more attracted to wildlife images lately. I think I'm going to invest in a telephoto lens, so I can get some shots like these of my own. I like the unique moments in animal behavior you can capture. Like the mother and baby gorilla. I'm particularly interested primate images, there's a lot of humanity in them, in the eyes. I also like the practice of really getting to study and know your wildlife subject. I want to immerse myself in something and capture something unique.