CSLR Challege 109 Results

Only one shot in each category placed this time. In the eligible category, longing for the sea placed 11th and Mechanical Wake, a shot of Alma's Car's door handle, placed 7th.

Shooting Shinny things is hard!

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Had quite a learning experienced doing the 'Lexus Shoot' for a recent CSLR challenge. I wanted to take 'artsy' shots that accentuated the curves of the car and with the silver color of the car, make it look like jewelry. Every thing was single light source with very direct lighting and a lot of falloff.
The big problem with shooting something so shinny is that you can see everything in the refections - I had to use my backdrops to block out objects from in the garage - initially all the shots would have reflections of tool boxes, benches and everything else in the garage. Once I blocked those out all I had to do is stop getting me and the camera in the reflections.
Probably shot about 100 shots to get the ones here - Even though they all look black and white, there was no conversion it's just the way the car's tones come out - any toning seen was all done with shifting white balance.
The one thing I did learn from this shoot is how nice it would be to have a big open studio with no clutter for shots like this.

Latest CSLR Challenge

After winning the last challenge, I had to come up the the topic and host this challenge. I chose 'Mechanical Art as the topic' and it turned out to be quite a challenge for me. I ended up putting up the maximum number of entries allowed and I don't think I was quite taken by any of them, but with me being off work for the holidays it did give me the time to do 3 separate shoots for this topic which was fun. Although it seems I may be stuck in a rut with my lighting technique - seems all the different pictures have the same low key lighting. Will have to break out of that...

TaW:#2 - Moonshot Split tone.

Before Canon 1dmkII 300mm2.8L w/1.4x (500s @ F8 ISO200)

Okay, heres what I started with, a basic moon shot. I started this out as an exercise on using my camera's spot meter to properly expose a small moon against a dark sky as well as trying every trick I knew to get a sharp picture - Tripod, Mirror lockup, fast shutter speed, and since I didn't have my remote cord, I used the camera's ten second timer to make sure any vibrations from my finger hitting the shutter had a chance to settle out before the image was taken.

Well after getting the image into the computer it was pretty boring. So a little magic in Lightroom playing with Clarity, tone curves and finally a bit of split toning thrown in at the end just for fun got me this.

After:

It looks much better at full resolution. But tone curves is the magic tool to use for bringing out the texture in the moon's surface. Using the tone curve, I repositioned the shadow and highlight markers to the edges of the histogram, Then I set the shadow slider to -100 and the Highlight slider to +100 and adjusted the lights and darks to get as much texture out of the midtones as possible. This really let the sharpness tool get some extra detail when cranked up. Finally a little spilt toning to turn the shadows blue and there you go, quite a bit of difference from where we started. And no trips to CS3 - all Lightroom, I love it. :-)

Ain't the Internet great.

No matter what my problem is, someone's bound to have had it (and blogged about it ) before me.
Since I run a GoDaddy Domain, hosted through GoogleApps some of their tools don't play nice outside the network. I don't know why the same Google services work differently on their 'Apps' page but it does and I couldn't get our GTalk to work with Twitter but found this:

Cyborg Labs » Blog Archive » How to make Twitter work with your Google Apps hosted domain on GoDaddy

'Skaterboy' takes first place!

I guess the "4th time's the charm" as my 'skaterboy' won 1st place in the Canon SLR challenge on Pbase. There's no cash or prizes but it sure is great to have an image recognized by your fellow Canon shooters as being the best. Of course, it could have been more due to my model than my photographic skills! I better use Aly and Matthew for the next couple sessions before it goes to his head! You can see the larger version of the wining image here.

Oh oh...

Just placed my votes in the latest CSLR challenge and it appears that my submission Skaterboy is currently in the lead! It's still very early in the process, but it was nice to see none-the-less. The only thing with winning a challenge is you need to think of the next topic and host the challenge. The whole idea of me doing these challenges was that I could never come up with new photographic ideas and now after just a couple of these I gotta come up with a original topic? Great. Here's hoping for 2nd place...