Tough challenge idea to be sure... saw the thread discussing concepts and this one came to me. Looked up notification telegrams for examples then prepared my own in Photoshop. 100% created from scratch, no cut and paste from existing. No PFC Sweeney from Wichita that I'm aware of. The photo is my late father in his Army photo. I edited the patch to say SWEENEY. He served well after WW2, so the uniform will hopefully not give that away to anyone. I have no photos of my dad as a kid, so that photo is actually a famous photo by Walker Evans called "Baby in High Chair". Again, hopefully not a giveaway. Finally the "whiskey" follows the "near beer" practice of the movies and is in fact sweet tea poured into a high-ball glass (we use for water, lol).
The good news is of course that the son is no longer missing.
The bad news is that he (the character) in fact did die, so the hope is gone and the grieving can begin.
Predicted strike points: People won't know what a telegram looks like and think it's just a bad paste job. Someone will recognize the uniform or the child photo. Or other things I'm missing. Or they won't get the the good news portion.
But I'm thrilled it turned out as I envisioned it. So it's entered and we shall see.
Original title: "nightmare on elm street"
Submitted title: "relief by nightmare"
Revised before deadline to: "no worse death than the end of hope" a quote from Pelagius.
Argh! Titles. now "relief, then grief"
[Sep. 5th, 2022 09:49:45 AM]
Wow... took hours for a first vote... so sad this place is a shadow of its former self. I wonder what happened.
Good news: I'm back
Bad news: Scoring as per normal, lol.
First vote was an 8 yay! Followed by a 6 (normally yay, but you always hope you'll just run all 8s or 9s, lol)
[Sep. 6th, 2022 12:05:08 PM]
Still slow... only 5 votes in 36 hours. Was a holiday (in USA), so reasons.
7.2 (2x8, 2x7, 1x6) by my math. Avoiding the spreadsheet. But happy so far. Long way to go and the boobirds come out later too.
[Sep. 7th, 2022 10:23:20 AM]
Held 7.16 for a bit, then an erroneous 5 just knocked it to 6.85. Ah DPC!
POST-RESULTS:
Disappointed. Clearly I misunderstood the challenge. I thought we were to show good news and bad news IN the photograph. Not take a Free Study photograph and then make up a title/caption for it to fulfill the good news/bad news part.
HM is nice, but I really expected some level of ribbon for this one. Felt I nailed the challenge as stated -- and many times in the past was told that my entries were shoehorns that only met the challenge because of the title, not the image -- but in this case that appears to have been the goal.
Given where it was and a couple of 5-pedoes near the end of the voting drove it down even further. Of course the lack of participation gives added weight to every vote for good or bad... so with more votes it might have scored higher or lower, who knows.
GOOD NEWS: You got top 5
BAD NEWS: No ribbon.
Statistics
Place: 4 out of 25 Avg (all users): 6.6667 Avg (participants): 6.9000 Avg (non-participants): 6.4545 Views since voting: 243 Views during voting: 52 Votes: 21 Comments: 5 Favorites: 0
Every so often I miss, by shortsightedness or obscure principle or sense of ignorance about the challenge, voting. This time it was mere shortsightedness. "relief, then grief," by my lights, is a very fine image with strong emotional gravity. I can't see me voting less than an 8 here. I have great admiration for your ability to create this scene, which does nail the full breadth of the challenge rather than being a slapped on title for an extraneous image. Sorry I snoozed past the challenge.
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