APAC Photoclub Submissions, December 2012:dltphoto

It's punishment time again.... hahahah (just kidding). The December month sees a previous judge (an artist/ painter), umm adjudicator, from last year, the same adjudicator who gave me a 10. Not knowing this before I submitted my images, I sadly uploaded them a day before we were informed who the judge would be. So, I was stuck with the images I chose. I may have been a little more daring had I have known. Its all good though.

Experimental, "Night Watchmen", score 8

This is one of my first "Over edited" images. Basically, I had an image I really wanted to work but I didn't enjoy the lack of overall depth in the image. The initial shot (below) was impossible to get at the time since the only method of keeping the sky in the shot would have been to flash the subjects which clearly was not possible. So I had no other option than to "fake" a sky.

Crows at Barkerville, original shot

After trying several rich blue sky and cloudy shots in the background from my stock of sky images, I felt no impact with any of them.
Then I recalled some images I had just shot with a Lensbaby and thought I would try it with that sky ( an image I won't share yet as its to be a future submission). The effect was much more dramatic. It appeared much more "moon-lightish" with the Crows. Not the perfect blend of images but I thought it created a nice mood and something that you might not normally see. Crows in the dark would be pretty hard to spot and shoot. The light I had on the roof worked nicely simulating  moon glare on the roof top. Overall. I was quite pleased with the final outcome.

Second image for the night.

Open, "20th Century Rock Music",  Score 8

This is a very simple Lensbaby shot of a discarded CD I stumbled across on a bike ride to work. The light fell on it perfectly and created some nice colour tones. The blurring was the lensbaby effect. I had shown the image to a club member previously and they could'nt figure out what they were looking at, so I thought they might need help determining the subject matter, hence the title.

Finally I submitted a print for the assigned topic "People at Work". Challenging.
Scrolling through my hoards of images and I found a Barkerville shot of which the people dressed in character dress, were working the streets... I threw a quick aged action over with with some nasty lens vignette on it to make look super old-school, since its a "period" style shot.

* Addition, The Adjudicator, Janet, actually critiqued this image during the post let-down. She enjoyed the interaction, the movement of the people. She also enjoyed the dark bottom left-hand corner which compensated for the lighter top right hand corner. She also felt the people's heads angle lead you nicely down to that dark left hand corner. I can see the appeal of that. none of which was intentional, at least I don't think my brain saw that, but maybe it did.*

Assigned, "Barkerville- Still working", score 25 (3rd place)

Thanks to Colin for helping me with the title for this one. I hate titling images... hate it.