Color!

[ccd333]

Rain slickened gully near Crested Butte, Colorado (August 2004)

 

[mentos_007]

very sad pic. . . It looks like a cementary... very sad background and all those flowers

 

[StvShoop]

wow!

it doesn't seem sad to me.
the objects (leaves, flowers, rocks) are so intense! it makes me think of all the work that would have to go into clearing that patch or how much work went into the gulley's creation. i haven't seen something like this before.

the main thing i don't like is the piece of hill shown at the top of the shot.
in the image, the "hill" and "gulley" are too separate and objectified. i think the hill is necessary though (this setting you've found was created by the hill eroding, right?). maybe if you crouched down lower to the rocks and plants and angled up more? it's a problem with the image's meaning, which i think should be corrected in the composition

i'm not crazy about the lighting. there's no shadows anywhere. i think the diffuse lighting helps to emphasize the clusteredness of the profusion of objects, but it causes the scene to be too low-contrast imo.

i think you've found a great source of photographs at that site
welcome to the forums, if you haven't been welcomed in another thread.

 

[ccd333]

I tried cropping the "hill" out of the image before....it does focus the image more on the flowers....BUT....it takes away IMHO from the sense of where does this serpentine band of rocks on the right side of the image go??? By having just a tad of the terrain above the patch of flowers, it makes my imagination wander to that place where the gully goes.

As far as the lighting.....it was raining! The slick rocks really help the scene.....I would not trade that component for more shadows.

 

[LizM]

I like it! Nice juxtaposition with the living flowers and the unliving rock!