Ancient Tree by Scott Smith

An amazing array of colours and textures, looks almost like metallic elements embedded into the wood

Yes, this is HDR. I believe that dust spot is an artifact of a bit of a weed, that blurred during stacking - I'll have to dig up the originals to see. I have a large print of this in my house, I might check that too ;)

This is an extremely eye catching shot. The contrast in colors is what draws my eye; the gray sky in contrast to the green and deep brown/orange of the tree are fantastic. Composition wise, this is very pleasing, with the stump coming from one side of the photo and sweeping across in that undulating form. It looks to me as though this is possibly a stacked HDR shot? I say this because there is a small amount of ghosting around the edges of the trunk and the foreground greenery. There also looks to be a small dust spot just above the foreground in the center sky portion - easy fix. Overall, a very nice image!