Awesome!!

Imaginative indeed, but look at the goal, you may have to crop it a little closer.

" I hate cropping with a burning passion, and only do so to straighten a photo or to fix poor composition, otherwise I see cropping as a useless editing technique. "

That is your option, but if the theme is CLOSE-UP you will either have to overcome your aversion, or learn to get closer. Not all of us are clever enough to perfectly frame every photograph.

friiskiwi, I do minor cropping to fix composition issues, I have no arguments with that. Others can take picture and majorly crop if they want, I am mostly against it because of the reduction of quality. I shoot medium format film, and when I print, a lot of times I do crop, only because I have the quality to crop. Unfortunately this was taken with a simple point and shoot and I couldn't get any closer, it also didn't have that much good quality to begin with, and cropping only accents that. I'm sorry if I came off as judging, it is just a personal preference that I avoid cropping when possibl

amazing!!

Can't say I blame you author. I am not a big fan of cropping down images either- usually I just don't enter the themes that require macro type stuff as I don't own a macro lens and in my opinion cropping an image just can't compare.