I saw the way the trees looked this morning and thought, oh, those are pretty, I should take a picture. Hours later I was browsing through the forums and reading the thread about this challenge and suddenly thought of the trees and this title. YAY! Not even a shoehorn ;-)
BTW, the tree is a Japanese Snowbell, in case anyone cares. Pretty, hardy, keeps its roots to itself, smells lovely when in bloom.
PP - converted from RAW, cropped, levels, white balance, dodged/burnt foreground clump, increased saturation, cloned leaves onto bright sky spots in background, resized, sharpened with noise reduction, added border, blurred a few cloned spots and cloned a bit more tree trunk on the far right so it didn't look crooked.
Statistics
Place: 121 out of 194 Avg (all users): 5.6043 Avg (commenters): 6.0000 Avg (participants): 5.3143 Avg (non-participants): 5.8986 Views since voting: 921 Views during voting: 207 Votes: 139 Comments: 6 Favorites: 0
For me, at first glance, your image is visually deceptive. My eyes saw the dark tree on the right and followed the outstretched branch, leading me to think the flowers were from that branch. As my eyes adjusted to your image I saw the flowers are hanging by a different branch and in a way seem to be kind of...."floating" for lack of a more technical word. (I'm not much of a technical person, so you'll have to bear with my first impression comment).
Composition: 4 - Not sure what it is - maybe a little too much of nothing on the right side.
Technical: 6
Creativity: 6
Appeal: 5
Challenge: 6
Overall Calculated Average Score: 5
Perfect title for this shot and for the challenge. Nice focus on the flowers and the background is nicely out of focus. I think I might have cropped out some of the background and made it a vertical image, although you would have to have some of the background to support the "tree" in the title.
Although you have a good depth of field, the composition of the back is a bit distracting for me. I like the being pulled to the earth by gravity. Pretty