SDN Monthly Photo Challenge (not 56K safe, eventually)

[Akumz Razor]

76- squares

[aerius]

#60, A stranger unaware of your camera.

Time to get a telephoto lens and hit the nude beach!

[The Grim Squeaker]

#60, A stranger unaware of your camera.

Time to get a telephoto lens and hit the nude beach!

Try doing it with a wideangle for a challenge. I can give you pics from my collection if you run low on ideas or running speed

[J]

#70, Architecture atypical to your area. I think this should go better than my last one.

[J]

Hmmm...I think Bounty's photo could be improved with some cropping to even the balance, I'm thinking a roughly square crop where the right side of the photo is trimmed off. This would give a better balance of light & dark and sky & clouds.

[J]

Allan Gardens Conservatory (click for full sized picture)


Taken in colour then mixed down to B&W with the channel mixer tool in Photoshop to darken the sky and hide some distracting trees in the background. Unfortunately there's a bunch of apartment buildings behind the subject so this was the best angle I could find, thus the slightly weird perspective in the photo. I did some perspective correction in Photoshop to try & make the walls nice & square but I wasn't entirely successful.

[aerius]

#60 A stranger unaware of your camera

I just pointed the camera at her breasts and snapped a picture.
I hope she doesn't find me and kill me...

[The Grim Squeaker]

So you did use a Wideangle . Have a cooky

[muse]

#62 - One thing not like the others

I guess the good part is this leaves the subject matter fairly wide open, on the other hand, I have no idea where to start.

[generator_g1]

#60 - A stranger unaware of your camera.



I don't know if that's a tattoo or just henna paint. @_@. Good thing my camera had a swiveling LCD so it wasn't obvious that I was taking her picture....

[Akumz Razor]

76- squares

edit- the original:

[J]

#60 A stranger unaware of your camera

I just pointed the camera at her breasts and snapped a picture.
I hope she doesn't find me and kill me...

I move to have this picture disqualified from the contest on the grounds that it's clearly pandering to the young male demographic which makes up 99% of this board.

In addition, we know this woman so she doesn't count as a stranger.

[aerius]

In addition, we know this woman so she doesn't count as a stranger.

We know her now, but I didn't even know her name when I took the picture and you hadn't met her yet, so I maintain that she was a stranger and the picture qualifies for the contest.

[muse]

One of these things is not like the others...

[Bounty]

In before the deadline...

#48, A Scene That Makes No Sense

[The Grim Squeaker]

Mwahaha. I was about to ask for an extension, but I talked one of my friends into modeling for me, so I have a half-asses portrait submission (pity portraits weren't my submission for next month, I'll have at least one more girl modeled by next weekend ).
I'll submit it as soon as I get the lass's approval .

[Simplicius]

Well, I'm out this round. Even if I make the photos by the end of the month, E-6 dev. is a mail-to-Boston kind of thing. Also I've been run ragged doing not-photography-at-all this month, so it will be a while before I can get back into the groove. Comments will happen after the deadline, once I've relaxed a little.

[The Grim Squeaker]

Doh. Forgot to submit my submission on time despite uploading it, so here it is .

89: Face only portrait:

Dass-8


Hope it's the popular choice this time .

Random rolling: First was 89 again, reroll has it as 15 - Stopped motion.

[Simplicius]

Yeah, I've been remiss in starting Round 3, so let's have that now.




Mine is #99, Stones.

Comments on the Round 2 entries:

J: I like the building. I'm also partial to the heavily-filtered B&W look, especially where it gives really strong contrast between a light-colored building and a really dark sky. I can see where the perspective shift gave you trouble over on the right side, though.

If you ever go back to this building, try it with a wide or ultrawide if you can and shoot head-on. I have a hunch that the symmetry of the main and supporting domes and some distortion giving more depth to the wings would give a strong effect, plus you would be able to stand closer and maybe avoid those apartment buildings easier.

Aerius: Meets the technical requirements of the theme, maybe, but not terribly creative. Comedy points deducted for not focusing on her chest with a narrow depth of field.

generator_g1: Same sort of problem with aerius's, although yours looks less rushed. The challenge in making a true good candid is to put the balance of your effort toward making the photo, with being stealthy or sneaky coming in second. There are millions of photos of the backs of people's heads out there, but there is a reason why relatively few of those pictures are actually made.

Akumz Razor: I think this is a really neat idea. The composition's a little unbalanced, but the subtle Microsoft reference is worth it.

This is a concept you could really go somewhere with. You could turn aerial surveys into Mondrian-eque abstracts, for instance...

muse: This is pretty good. I'm not sure whether the overall appearance of the photo owes more to lighting and/or processing, or to the color of the letters and their background, but I think it looks good. I can see this working well for stock photography. I think it would need to be a bit more carefully composed, e.g. to keep out disturbances like in the top left corner.

Bounty: It...makes no sense. Looks like there's a model sheep in there, and a stuffed jungle cat. A bit too much foreground too, because of the brightness. I'm curious to know what the strip down the middle is all about. It looks like there's a reflection in it, but it's not really distorting the view outside either.

Death: Good choice, as this is one of the better efforts. With softer lighting and the right PP this would make a good glamour-type studio shot.

[Bounty]

I'm curious to know what the strip down the middle is all about. It looks like there's a reflection in it, but it's not really distorting the view outside either.

It's what you get when you home-convert a 120 film camera to take 35mm, and take you pictures "backward" - expose the right-hand side of the subject on the (eventual) left-hand side of the frame first, then expose the left-hand side on the remainder of the frame. The bright band is an accidental strip of double-exposure. The excess foreground is partially from putting the camera down on the ground without enough support under it - the viewfinder is hard enough to use at eye level and on the ground I couldn't properly guess what I was framing - and partially because I had not aperture or shutter speed controls whatsoever. I just waited for the natural light to look more or less okay-ish and hoped for the best.

I'd like to comment on the other images but I'd basically be parroting you I'm afraid. Still:

76- squares

This is a great idea. It takes the theme and does something totally weird with it, but with more than enough skill and inspiration to work perfectly.

EDIT: my theme for this month is 88 - weeds

[J]

J: I like the building. I'm also partial to the heavily-filtered B&W look, especially where it gives really strong contrast between a light-colored building and a really dark sky. I can see where the perspective shift gave you trouble over on the right side, though.

If you ever go back to this building, try it with a wide or ultrawide if you can and shoot head-on. I have a hunch that the symmetry of the main and supporting domes and some distortion giving more depth to the wings would give a strong effect, plus you would be able to stand closer and maybe avoid those apartment buildings easier.

Though I don't have an ultrawide nor fisheye lens, I did simulate the effect by standing closer to the building and taking several pictures, then stitching them together with the software that came with my camera. It does hide most of the apartment buildings and give a nice symmetrical view, but if I'm close enough to get the buildings hidden to my satisfaction I'm way too close to get a good view of the domes. The walls feel like they're looming above me while the domes look too small and cut off, I'd have to put the camera on a pole or shoot from a ladder or something. My husband also suggested taking the picture as normal from straight ahead and then removing the unwanted buildings in Photoshop, it's something I might do when I have a bunch more time.

[aerius]

Aerius: Meets the technical requirements of the theme, maybe, but not terribly creative.

As I've mentioned before in another thread, I suck at taking pictures of people and that's why I let my wife take care that subject.

Comedy points deducted for not focusing on her chest with a narrow depth of field.

You know, I can definitely see your point here. This is a great view.
Unfortunately there's no way to do a shallow depth of field on my camera.

[The Grim Squeaker]

Aerius: Meets the technical requirements of the theme, maybe, but not terribly creative.

As I've mentioned before in another thread, I suck at taking pictures of people and that's why I let my wife take care that subject.

See my PM . Girls have it much, much easier in taking people shots as a bse (And that's ignoring issues such as empathy or disliking people).

Comedy points deducted for not focusing on her chest with a narrow depth of field.

You know, I can definitely see your point here. This is a great view.
Unfortunately there's no way to do a shallow depth of field on my camera.

Sure you can! Zoom in, and very distant background. It's hard, but you can do it . (I wish I had a compacts DOF on a DSLR, OOF is overrated).
the main problem you, your wife and her sister have is a love for cropping that goes beyond what's sensible on a DSLr let alone compacts.

[RRoan]

99- Stones

[muse]

muse: This is pretty good. I'm not sure whether the overall appearance of the photo owes more to lighting and/or processing, or to the color of the letters and their background, but I think it looks good. I can see this working well for stock photography. I think it would need to be a bit more carefully composed, e.g. to keep out disturbances like in the top left corner.

Thanks! Yeah, that upper left corner is a bit messy, I tried to clean it up a bit with the clone stamp tool but most of my attempts ended up looking worse than the original. I'll have to get my sister or her husband to work on it, they're better at this Photoshop stuff than me. All I did was brighten up the picture a little and crop it to taste.

I'm curious to know what the strip down the middle is all about. It looks like there's a reflection in it, but it's not really distorting the view outside either.

It's what you get when you home-convert a 120 film camera to take 35mm, and take you pictures "backward" - expose the right-hand side of the subject on the (eventual) left-hand side of the frame first, then expose the left-hand side on the remainder of the frame. The bright band is an accidental strip of double-exposure.

So that's what happened. I thought it was a failed attempt at joining together pictures in Photoshop, it looked like you had them all lined up and then selected the wrong blend mode or something.