Sunsets through a Lens :dltphoto

So, we have all seen beautiful sunsets. Many times they are so incredibly hard to photograph and you really just can't capture on camera what your seeing. Also as a creative photographer how do you make this sunset be something that someone wants to look at. How many variations of a sunset can be done before its all been done??

I just found some images from my camping this year and I remembered that I had attempted to change my normal view to something more creative or did i just something crap and should I delete it?

 I have shot through these trees a million times and I am sure I have dozens of images like this on previous posts. Can I do something more to make this some thing everyone will want to look at? What if I make it out of focus?

At the time I thought this looked pretty cool. I have never done an out of focus sunset before. At least not this intentional! So I pushed it a little further...

How abstract can one now start to get? Is it now a beautiful sunset on the lake or just some computer generated file from some paint program?? What now? Can I really show this? After all now it has no context. No obvious signs that its a beautiful moment in time by a lake with a camera..

Did I create a design piece?

Hmmm, Or is it just a orange blob with some vague reddish blobs???

Can I use the two images together?

      Original                                                   Out of Focus                                  Combined

Perhaps I should just stick to my day blob!!!

The End

APAC Photoclub Submissions, September 2012: dltphoto

Well, Its photoclub season again. This means submitting new images to be critiqued and butchered by "experienced" judges in the photo judging industry!.. Hahahahah, not really! well maybe somewhat.

So the Judge for this first month was Francois.. no, Francoise... umm I forget, lets call him Frank for short. Frank was very specific about how he wants to see images. He wants them "RAZOR SHARP", and I quote "images need to be Razor Sharp".
Fortunately  my images were "RAZOR SHARP", sadly one was of a sunset type scene. Frank suggested if your going to submit Sunset Scenes, it had better be spectacular because he's seen them all. Wonderful! this exhibition night should be interesting.

Sunset on Lake, score 8

First up was my shot in the Landscape category, As you see I scored an 8, which is really not a bad score in the photoclub world. I guess the only way to have scored a 9 or 10 would have meant that my image needed to be "spectacular". Its not your stereo typical sunset, its bold and vibrant. Actually it shows very little of the sunset since its just a reflection/ ambient shot. 

So, feeling pretty good about myself so far. Next up a Film Marco shot I did which I featured in a previous post "Pink Wheat". Having enter film images before and watching them being judged up against digital images and imaging wizardry, I have decided to enter them through the digital process without people knowing its film. The Judges are now so used to manipulated images that they aren't able to assess film images the way they should.

Needless to say my second entry into the "macro" category scored me a repeated 7. I didnt expect to score so well anyways. Its a random shot with shallow depth of field that really makes the image kind of messy, since the wheat was blowing in the wind, it was a case of rapid shooting to get one good one. Perhaps if I attempted some better selective cropping it could work better. I am really not a "special effects" type person, I enjoy good "razor sharp" images that I can capture in the camera and tweak mildly in programs like Lightroom. I am soooo not a heavy filter on top of filter type of guy. I am going to keep sticking to my plan and the photography I enjoy. Good "razor sharp" images as close to out of camera as possible and hopefully they will look "spectacular". Is that OK Frank?

 We did have an assigned topic for this month, "though a window", but alas I didnt have anything I thought really worthy that might score well. No need to put in something I personally wouldn't have scored well. This was a pic I considered but it wasn't crying out to me.