Round 11 - DVXUser Photography Contest - 11.15.06

Sounds good to me.

I'd also like some *really* tight themes sometimes too. Like "Apple", for example. Very little space for freedom, just pure photo-skills.

- Mikko
 
OH divine! I just came up with a fun contest! What do you people say if we shoot something with no theme and than run a random pick algorithm and each one gets to Photoshop the image of another contestant? Cool or are you throwing tomatoes?
 
Jeremy Ordan said:
How would ya'll like to have an extra couple of days to work on things? Announcing on Fridays so you get two weekends to work on projects?

Real quick poll... Very quick in fact.
Click to expand...

Sounds good... you're still talking about having it every week, but just announcing it a couple days early, right? For example... you'll announce round 13 topic before we even get to the deadline for round 12.
 
Since you asked...

1 or 2 weeks is fine with me.

I definitely am not doing this for any prizes.

As for the photoshop idea, I know you intend on mixing things up, but I wish there was less emphasis on "original photo" and "photoshop skils" and more on just judging the quality of the one final photo we submit.

I'm sure I'm in the minority on that, but it would be a lot easier if we just sent up one photo and gave that photo a score.

Chris
 
I have to agree with that too.

Shooting a photo is easy enough to do most weeks. And voting and commenting is part of the process too. But when you have to vote on multiple categories for each photo, it jsut becomes too much work.

I think however we are making whatever we are making, the result should be one image that is voted on once for the regular contests.

- Mikko
 
Well just FYI, the next three weeks are all themes, divisions, and concepts of photography carried out.

Regardless...

Tomorrow I will post Round 13 for those who want some extra time to work on it

And

like I've said in the past, the voting categories are going to change based upon the contest. Next weeks, for example, has to voting categories and no original image to be submitting and no judging the processing work.

PLUS

I will put something together that will be announced by Monday... consider it: Round 13 1/2 for our post processing junkies :)

Tomorrow though, look for round 13.
 
Prizes not necessary, and we obviously can't afford to offer them every round. What if we did a ten round contest with a prize to the overall top score based on an average of the ten rounds? That way there's a reason to keep people involved and entering, and we don't have to scrounge up a prize every week!
 
i like the fact that they are frequent but a little more time might help get more entries. I know that i can suddenly get busy and may have entries ready but miss the short window where uploads are allowed (as i did with the comments part)

I do enjoy the pressure of coming up with photos frequently, if we get too much time i think i would consider things too much, i like the immediacy (sp?) of the current format.
 
OK, here are this weeks winners...

1.
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7.91 by Owen
2.
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7.18 by moojangles
3.
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7.08 by Jeremy Ordan
4.
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6.42 by Krestofre
5.
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5.91 by Owen
6.
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5.82 Moojangles
 
Woohoo! 4th place. I'm moving up boys!

Congrats to everyone who entered. Some really good shots!

Thanks for the work on Round 11. Now I've got to find something to enter for Round 12....
 
Great round -- and thanks for everyone's feedback. I'm going to knock down the post-processing a few notches and lose that reflection before I get a print of that shot. I just happened to be in NYC during this round, so that was nice.

As far as details, the Statue of Liberty shot was totally handheld on a moving boat around 9:30pm... so I have about 100 worthless blurry shots and somehow got this one. Canon Rebel XT with stock 18-55mm lens.
 
After looking at the votes, this one sort of ran the gauntlet as far as votes, picking up a lot of high marks and then a ton of low marks, leaving that middle ground untouched... Well this was my entry:

preview_08_post.jpg


And this is my story behind it:
As far as the shot goes, we had just wrapped a very long... and by very long, 3+ hour photo shoot with three backdrop changes, 11 wardrobe changes, and then an hour of wardrobe-less shooting with over 900 images for a project that I have been working on. This is a model I have shot a lot and she always does amazing work. This was shot on the D50, ISO 200, F/2.8, 50 shutter, Sigma 105mm macro lens at 1.4 magnification about 3" off the eye, tripod stabilized, manually focused with auto white balance.

In post I sharpened outside the eye, brought the saturation down a bit on the skin (we were shooting under 3 1200 watt soft box flourescents), brought up the brown, and sharpened the eye lashes that were on the focal plane.

I wanted to keep the eye itself soft in order to emphasize the female characteristics of the eye... I need to post a sharper iris image to show how masculine it comes out looking with the harder lines; I just wasn't a fan.

I have done these shots a couple of times and normally clone out any reflection in the pupil just a couple of steps above pitch black but wanted to show the reflection for the contest.

Personally I like the characteristics of the image but wish I had frames for the entire eye, brought the white of her eye out more, and desaturated another 25% for the flesh tones to direct attention towards the eye. The framing is slightly off and wish that I had cropped an additional 10% off the flesh to push the pupil up in the image.

Otherwise, yeah, that is really it. I actually hate macro photography in general and think that it works very counter to my normal style and preference of shooting, but consider it a much overlooked division and style. This was fun.

Thanks for the comments....
 
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