this is great

amazing details

wow!!!!!

Great shot! I like the colors.

im definetely not going to be the first place because of this picture lol... well done mate =)

Thanks everyone. Lots of shots taken especially to assure that the vessel located at 2 o'clock wasn't something that came from a swamp in the amazon.

AMAZING! A real winner! very well done author! i hope you do really really well in this competition

Thank you ! I'm watching you.

Congrats, well deserved.

Your comment for another entry about persistence was right on....lots of shots, but fun theme. Thanks for your congrats.

Nice Job Congrats on first place Win

I think it's beautiful

Wow ! That's perfect, I love it

Did you use a macro lens for this?

Thanks^_^ no, I took this with a fujifilm finepix. It has a really good macro ratio and when done right you get just amazing quality out of it. I've taken macro shots with that camera that pale in comparison with my macro lens on my Canon. As long as I don't zoom, I get amazing quality and fairly close.

Thank you for the information

this is lovely

amazing shot! well done author

Congrats

This is an amazing close-up

wow!

very impressive!

This is what we call "close"

Thank you for your kind comments I wish I had something in the iris though to make it more intresting besides my lense

Oh my gosh! this is incredible! well done!!

Congrats

Love the title and caption! amazing shot! and well done

Awesome!!

Imaginative indeed, but look at the goal, you may have to crop it a little closer.

" I hate cropping with a burning passion, and only do so to straighten a photo or to fix poor composition, otherwise I see cropping as a useless editing technique. "

That is your option, but if the theme is CLOSE-UP you will either have to overcome your aversion, or learn to get closer. Not all of us are clever enough to perfectly frame every photograph.

friiskiwi, I do minor cropping to fix composition issues, I have no arguments with that. Others can take picture and majorly crop if they want, I am mostly against it because of the reduction of quality. I shoot medium format film, and when I print, a lot of times I do crop, only because I have the quality to crop. Unfortunately this was taken with a simple point and shoot and I couldn't get any closer, it also didn't have that much good quality to begin with, and cropping only accents that. I'm sorry if I came off as judging, it is just a personal preference that I avoid cropping when possibl

amazing!!

Can't say I blame you author. I am not a big fan of cropping down images either- usually I just don't enter the themes that require macro type stuff as I don't own a macro lens and in my opinion cropping an image just can't compare.