Wow! That Samyang is clearly a great partner for the K5IIs. Love the extreme shallow DOF, great crispness and purely soft background. I can understand why you framed wide, but probably a closer crop would be better.

3 and 5 are the best for me 3 has a turgid and aggressive sea, but the sky is calm and natural, a perfect contrast. 5 has such interesting foreground elements and beautiful lighting, and the transition from horizon to deep blue sky is excellent.

I don't think the moving sky works - looks more like a zoom blur effect really, and I feel the compo in both these first boat shots is rather dull.

No 4 is effective with the moving grasses - but the very busy sky (& very bright left side) is competing for attention, and the bright inside of the boat looks unnaturally lit.

Looks scary! Like some kind of supernatural phenomena coming to snatch those people away ... OK, my imagination is running away, but it shows the shots are very effective. Great first attempts The movement blur on the figures just adds to the ghostly atmosphere.

One Hour Photo! Brilliant, yes Jim Carrey, you've got to like him to really like him

How about a photo themed one - I love that one with Robin Williams as the creepy photo bureau worker (in a big superstore) who for years has been making extra prints of a family he obsesses about ... the scene in his flat where we turn to see the wall to wall prints of the family is spine-tingling I think its called Photo Guy ?

I like the colour version of the first - it has a spooky atmosphere. I also (very unusually for me) really like your 2nd mono version of this shot.

The blurred area works well and the transition between the car and its surrounds is very tidy - were you using layer masking? In any case its nicely done. Well worth the experimenting!

I think the car itself needs a bit of work - it lacks contrast and depth in the colours - the blacks are weak and red needs a boost. Also the car shows a fair bit of noise - I'd give it a dose of luminance noise reduction also.

Its interesting how you've done the two mono versions with such extreme contrast differences, but ultimately I don't think it works well as B & W, so it has to No1 for me. The soft muted colour tones blend nicely with the 'mono' greyness of the lighting conditions.

Will that make any difference to what we can all see on screen?

Its true that on this forum 'natural' is usually hailed as an aim in itself, in that if something is not seen as 'natural' then the photo 'doesn't work for me'.

I too dislike the heavily cooked, grunge style of HDR, with its artificially elevated shadows and over-detailing. But I do feel that when HDR is used naturally (ie simply to compress visible DR to an extent that reproduces the eyes own ability) it is also dismissed unfairly. This I believe is because of a long term conditioning to traditional photographic processes and their particular presentation of the world.