Thank you everyone for your kind comments. First off I like to say I was just hoping to place this week in the challenge. I was really not feeling my photo this week. I came close to the look I was looking for and I have some issues with it, believe it or not I feel I could have done better. My 22 inch monitor is having an issue on me right now and went out on me last week so all my RAW editing had to be done on my laptop which has a horrible glare to it when working with low light photos.
Everyone had great photo's for this challenge. If I had to pick one I would have picked (which is very hard to do) Marcels, I am surprised it didn't make the top three. I though it was a very strong photo and captured the theme well, again they were all great shots and winners in my book.
WUD the format for this week if I understand it right is, It's going to be a shootout between the past winners covering three themes across 10 days. Each new theme to be announced after judging of the current theme. With only few of us doing it Corey is going to pick his top three, then those three will be given a new challenge and repeat the same process again but this time he will pick his top two from the three remaining contestants, then issue a new challenge. Then those two he will pick his winner for the first quarter of the year. This is going to happen each quarter of the year, so at year end he will have four quarter winners who go though the same format as the quarterly winner did and at the end coming up with a "yearly winner" Once you win a quarterly challenge you have a spot in the yearly challenge and do not have to enter the quarterly challenges anymore. It seams to me that this will prevent the same person from dominating the quarterly challenges and give three other a chance at the year end challenge.
For this quarterly challenge Corey said each photographer will have a slight edge in each challenge. The first challenge is automobiles, I have an edge because I have shot a lot of trains and autos though the years. The next challenge my be (and I guessing by the way Coery was talking) could be wildlife. Rocky does good in this area and will have an edge in that subject. The next challenge after that could be night photography, and Shannon has an edge in that.
How ever the challenges fall the winner is going to have to endure three challenges in ten days and "place" in two of them and then win the final. Some of the subjects may or not fall into their shooting style.