Sorry for the hiatus yesterday. As I stated the day before, I was in a slump. I'm hoping the slump is over for now. Thanks to a good conversation with Jeff during lunch today I got excited about getting back to shooting tonight. He's at day #239 of his project and I guess I needed to know that he has off days too. Thanks for the encouragement today Jeff.
In the meantime, I had ample items to shoot tonight. Cameron had a Skate Party after school and then there was soccer practice. To top it all off Cameron lost another tooth (see my Facebook page for that story and the picture of the note he left for the Tooth Fairy!).
I was shooting at the skate party which is a real challenge. My own self imposed rule on this project is that I must use Manual Control on my images for the Pic-a-day shot. This was really fun with the skating rink lighting. The lights are really low, and then they flash off and on a lot. My meter was going crazy. In the end I had to do a lot of guessing. Anyway, I've learned that images showing movement can be really interesting. The first image shows movement during a skating rink game. I threw in a second shot that I really liked. I wanted to shoot a picture of the disco ball and other colored lights. I realized that the shot I was getting of these items were really boring. That is when I switched to Manual Focus and intentionally shot out of focus. I loved the effect.
I decided to post up the original image from which the top image came from. I think it's kinda neat to show how much I worked this image over to get where I got to! Words sometimes just don't seem to cut it.
Shot spex (top picture): RAW Image, Pentax K10D, ISO 200, 18mm, f3.5, 1.5 sec., no flash.
PhotoShop spex (top picture): Adjusted levels, Smart Sharpened (as always), and adjusted the Contrast. Adjusted the snot out of the Saturation and Hue. Applied the Poster Edges filter. Cropped out a ton of crap. In general I PhotoShopped the HECK out of this one!
Shot spex (bottom picture): RAW Image, Pentax K10D, ISO 200, 130mm, f6.3, 1/8 sec., no flash.
PhotoShop spex (bottom picture): Adjusted levels, Smart Sharpened (as always), and adjusted the Contrast quite a bit for a creative look. Cropped out some boring dead space.
Tunes listened to while editing: The Rainmakers - The Good News And The Bad News. The whole album. This is a great album! Gotta love the Rainmakers!
Shot #1 - Quite creative use of blur and your processing really make it work.
ReplyDeleteShot #2 - Brilliant! Awesome bokeh and colors.
Great shots both of them.