Emily Ferguson, Juvenile female snowy owl. This is amusing and creepy at the very same time. There's something truly alien about that owl's facial _expression_, non-human but then quite human and familiar. Every now and again images like this make you bump up against the great strangeness of life that lies just beneath the surface of things.
Don Roberts, Riding out the storm. There's no single point of interest here, and overall a rather scattered effect, an abstraction. The pair of birds in the lower left might be seen as riding out the storm, but at the same time the individual slowflakes seem more like a placid scene rather than a storm.
Art Faul, Self-promo with AVIS letters. I see the letters, but don't see much of a spoof, nor how this is a "self-promo," nor anything funny. The colored blurred object might be a newspaper, and the joke might be that since it's yellow it suggests yellow journalism.
Lea Murpy, Trust Examined. This is enigmatic, mysterious. There's a great deal of meaning inherent in typefaces, typography, and I imagine the numbers and circles and lines are a means of trying to quantify that meaning.
Shyrell Melara, Bite Bite. This might have been made more effective if the author had moved down a bit to get a fuller look at the child's face, and to isolate that face from the child in the left background.
Bob McCullorch, Bar Harbor. Like the snow photo above, this has no single point of interest, but rather a lot of competing and distracting elements. The white-shirted guy or gal in the foreground commands attention, which takes away from the boats and mountains in the distance.
Bob Sull, Lorain Lighthouse. This oversized image first appeared on my monitor with the bottom portion cropped, and I was struck by the composition. Very powerful, dynamic. And then when I scrolled down and saw the gulls on the shore, I felt like they were unnecessary and actually diluted the power of the top portion.
Yoram Gelman, Inactive Chair at former Scranton Lace Factory, Scranton, Pennsylvania. The image is one thing, the caption is another. The image speaks for itself. Abandonment, ruin, etc. The caption, IMO, is an unconvincing fiction.
David Dyer-Bennet, Snow Lace. This looks more like ice than snow and the bits of dirt conflict with the idea of lace.
