@!ex..(sorry all, sidestepping for a moment) I completely agree Alex with what you have said with respect to mine and the others that just show off the colors. Mundane perhaps or ho-hum. Yours are quite good I would just offer to you to watch the overexposure. For me it's too glaring and drives away the total awe that the photo could have (somewhat of a distraction). There's several places in those stadium shots and also in your cloud shot above which give the tell tale HDR sign. It's possible that your stadium shot's overexposure is from the HDR as I have noticed that happens with Photomatix. How does your single image look by comparison with respect to the latter? Anyway, all of this boils down to thinking out of the box which you do a fair job of demonstrating, breakaway from the norm and do something different. Sometimes we get to wrapped up in the subject matter itself (the highlight) and ignore other props / settings / objects that could add more dimension to the photo. Speaking of clouds..anyone could take a photo of various cloud types as you say but stepping aside to see what else can be done is the real art in the photo..here's a shot of that caliber. there were so many great views at this location but I couldn't find a good foreground object to make the photo that much better. With in-climate weather on the way, I hiked further until I found a suitable object, nabbed this one and said screw the rain! Took about an hour to get the mud off my hiking boots..well worth it.
Without You (Press L to Land Here) by Revup67, on Flickr
So, the stadium shot really shouldn't have any tell tale HDR artifacts, because it isn't HDR. I actually just blended 3 shots, and then did a star trail stack of the 3 where the fireworks were (basically using the LIGHTEN blend mode on different layers). I do agree though that the exposure was a too high, so I lowered it a bit, thanks for the critique (attached version).
Second, very cool shot of the clouds and the bench. Much more story to the shot, which not only adds to the composition but also adds a human element to it. I am not usually a hug he fan of selective color (although I am guilty of using it once or twice). I'd like to see the un selectively colored version, too if you still have it around.
