Nice shot! Yosemite is such a beautiful place. I really like the color of the sky and the calmness of the water. Must've been a nice, fresh autumn day by the looks of it.

The image does seem to be a bit blurry, and the airplane trails are a bit distracting for me. I can see you did a good attempt to remove one of them, but you forgot the reflection of it on the water ;-)
I can probably get rid of them myself though.

Thanks for your submission, good wallpaper for a lower resolution screen. :)

Usually chemtrails ruin pictures for me but they give movement to this one. I would have still liked it if regular clouds or even no clouds were in the sky instead of these strips of aluminum, barium and other chemicals the government dumps in the air all across our country every single day. :/ Oh, good picture though! "P

Love the lighting, clouds and the scenery in general.

Too over processed for my tastes. The sky is more purple than blue and the contrasting doesn't look right. I would love to see the original file though.

Wow. Did not expect to see this when the page loaded today. I think I submitted this more than half a year ago, seems ages to me. I think this was shot in February or March, there was still snow on the ground.
I really like this shot, but as you guys point out I got some things wrong, mostly in the editing department.

Everyone has made good points.
Most people saw the contrails as ugly and didn't bother taking the shot, I saw differently. I like what they added to the scene, I'm not slowed down or afraid of melding Man's interferences in a nature scene.
This was a tough edit for me back when I took this since I didn't have a lot of photo editing experience and I was also working on a cheap monitor that had very inaccurate color. HDR was necessary to expose the shadow foreground and sunlit background and this was my first HDR attempt.

I am flattered that this shot made it to the front page and that people will use it as a desktop background. I just would have like to make some major changes to it had I known it was going up ;- )

I also think that the vapour trails add to the image.. it just wouldn't be particularly interesting without them.

@Daddy_Gemini do you really believe that? Well, each to his own.

@BenD, maybe if you make those changes and email the new version to the webmaster they'll put it up for you.. or at least you could upload it somewhere else and link to it (pretty please!) I really want to use this as a wallpaper, but the blurriness just spoils it for me.

@P3T3R
I'll see what I can do. There's a good chance that I will re-edit it soon so I'll post a link when it's done or send you a message.

I love the memories this image reproduces. I have been to this spot more times that I can count and jumped off that rock into the freezing water dozens of times. My favorite part about this picture is knowing what is towering over you to the upper right, the enormous face of half dome. I stop and stare in awe every visit

Ensure the monitor color is correct before editing colors in photos. Otherwise, well done!

Your decision to take the shot (contrails and all) is what makes this art instead of just another photo. Well done!