well done

thank you !

nice colors

thank you

This is the 125th Army National Guard Infantry Regiment, I was given the opportunity to come out to their drill weekend to meet the guys and get some shots. They are mobilizing and heading out to Afghanistan and I will most likely be going with them to take pictures for a benefit gallery. One thing I learned from this weekend was these mortars don't go "thump" like they do in the movies, when the first one went off I was about 4 feet away and it knocked me on my butt, they all laughed and helped me up LOL

is this real smoke

Yes the mortar had just gone off when this was shot, it leaves a very large plume of smoke.

Is the white line on the top edges of the trees from the mid-tones or smoke? I do have to say that i hope you do not choose to go over there for the shoot. Its not a nice place and tomorrow my Daddy is going there and my heart is broken because of that. Please think about those that love you and take any other route you can even if it means the hard way to not not go. Please...

Amanda the halo around the trees is from when I saturated the blues. Because of the position of the sun hitting the treetops there wasn't much color there to begin with.

You forgot to say you werent going to afghanistan...

And wheres my 5 points dangit!? Hehe jk.

Wow! This is amazing!

Beautiful spot, great shot!

What a beautiful place great photo

I think this is a great shot. Love the DOF too. From a photography standpoint this is really good, just personally I'm not sure that this is a great example of stock photography.

Thx Ray. I made a change. Trying to grasp this concept of "stock".

I guess its easier to look at pictures as potential stock when you have experience chopping them up . I think the keys are a strong subject of focus (which is all in focus), generally avoid anything that is too 'busy' or moving, OOF. I like this one because of the stong lines and various shapes. You could twist this pic in to a number of other objects.

My personal view on this would be to crop out some of the peripheral objects, such as the care & tree to give a stronger focus on the subject. But this is a better example of stock photography in my view. For inspiration as to what stock photography looks like check out one of rht many pages like shutterstock, sxc.hu. There are a heap of links in the 'resources' tab at the top of the page.

Thanks so much for your advice Ray!! Much appreciated. I have made the suggested crop.