As you can tell his articles don't hugely appeal

Considering he says he's more interested in the why rather than the how he spends an awfully long time talking about tone curves, densitometers, and bar graphs before ending with a "ignore everything I just said, there are no rules".

Nub is an appropriate name for what it makes you look like.

www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nub

I think it's a very good image. Without seeing the rest of the competition it's hard to say if I'd have voted it top, but it certainly is interesting, different, well executed and not one of the endless clones of golden hour-mountain-water-clouds that tend to dominate landscape photography.

Reminds me of the time we saw nothing but pictures of Rudy for at least two months after he sat and posed for us

Perfection

Before reading the post itself I looked at the picture and assumed you meant "Don't give a duck a lack of space to swim into on the right"

Doesn't your eye tend to rest on people's faces in portraits? Meaning the white spot is pretty much where you don't want it to be. I think it IS a distraction but don't think it harms the overall image. edit - I guess one way of looking at it is this. If I were shooting a portrait of a model acting ...

For consideration.

I tend to agree his images rarely inspire me. They strike me as the kind of snapshots I take then disregard because they're boring. Or lazy street photography.