2012-08-03 - Projection Competition
"Rotting Away"
Category: Black & White
Contest Score: 23/27 - Did not place (at least one person received a perfect score this evening)
Print medium: Digital Upload
Location: Somewhere in New York state
Story behind the photo: I decided to go on a road trip around northern New York and spotted a large riverbed along the road... I saw a pull-off and decided to take a stroll. Great road trip through the mountains!
Camera gear:
- Canon Digital Rebel XTi
- Canon 11-18mm Ultra wide-angle
- Remote shutter release
- Tripod
Photo Specs:
Raw Image > 3-image HDR saved as Tif > Saved as Jpeg for upload
Focal Length: 11mm
Exposure: -2, 0, +2
Aperture: f/4.5
Shutter Speeds: 1/125, 1/500, 1/2000
ISO: 200
Software used:
- Photoshop
- Photomatix HDR software
Lessons learned:
- Needed to work on contrast between black & whites. Camera Raw would have been a good tool to use for adding contrast (Alt+Shift+A) in photoshop.
- Could have brought some of the highlights back using Camera Raw as well.
"Cleveland Stadiums"
Category: Color
Contest Score: 26/27 - 2nd place (at least one person received a perfect score this evening)
Print medium: Digital Upload
Location: The roof of the Terminal Tower in Downtown Cleveland, Ohio.
Story behind the photo: Being a member of CPS, we occasionally are granted access to places that the general public isn't able. About 3 times a year, we are allowed up to the roof to take photos of sunset and a few hours after! One of my absolute favorite field trips to take downtown!
Camera gear:
- Canon Digital Rebel XTi
- Tamron 18-200mm telephoto lens
- Remote shutter release
- Tripod
Photo Specs:
Raw Image > Converted to JPEG for upload
Focal Length: 28mm
Aperture: f/6.3
Shutter Speed: 4 seconds
ISO: 200
Software used:
- Photoshop
Lessons learned:
- I should have used camera raw (Alt+Shift+A) in Photoshop, to pull back some of the highlights.
- Used the Lens Correction filter (Shift+CTLR+R) in Pbotoshop, to correct the distortion from the lens. Some of the buildings had lines that weren't parallel, so I did what I could to correct them.
Final Thoughts:
Night photography is great fun, and I highly recommend it for anyone with a tripod! Fool around with long exposures and playing with lights. There are a ton of great tutorials on Youtube about light painting and other night photo techniques that yield some incredible results!
Unless you are trying to make an abstract photo with extreme angles, you should try to correct any unparallel building lines. Judges have been known to drop points for this during competitions.
If you haven't already, I highly recommend saving your images as PSD files, as you have the ability to go back and retouch things that you wouldn't be able to with Tiffs or Jpegs. Equally as helpful is to "convert your layer to a smart object", as you'll be able to go back and fix some of the changes you made... Make sure you "flatten your image" before you save to Jpeg (for digital uploads), but don't save over your PSD with the flatten image or you'll lose the layers. The downside is that PSD files are much larger, and require more hard drive space. With dropping prices on hard drive space, this is a problem easily circumvented!
