Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Honor's Night

Tonight was Honor's Night at the Bay Area Photo Club. On Honor's Night club members present photo's to a panel of three judges for critiques. Each photo is given a rating of Gold, Silver, Bronze or the dreaded No Award. There is an assignment category (tonight the assignment was Walls) and an Open category. Following are my two entries.



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This photo was given a Silver award by our judges. I posted the following version of this photo on the blog on July 23, 2008.



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You can see from comparison of the two photos that I did a lot of Photoshop work on the version presented tonight. In Photoshop I cloned out the three people and all of the ropes from the original shot and then rescaled the wall to make it look much higher. I also used Photoshop to render the blue lights on the bottom of the wall in the version presented tonight to add drama to the photo.

Following is the second photo that I entered in the Walls category tonight.



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This was my favorite of the two images and I thought it was a sure Gold. As often is the case I was wrong and received a No Award from our panel of judges. This photo is a pano stitched together from seven portrait shots taken of the wall. The Photoshop stitch was excellent but I wasn't able to remove all the lens distortion created by the wide angle lens I was using and by my close proximity to the center of the wall. So given lemons I made lemonade and used Photoshop to exaggerate the distortion which was an effect I really liked (resembling a shot taken with a fisheye lens).

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I like your rock climbing wall image a LOT and I sure could not tell you had done all the PS work. I had thought to try for a similar shot but didn't know if the place was still there as it has probably been 10 years since I went....good thing I didn't make the effort to find out! Yours has lots of impact and I like the colors and the lighting --- the shadow is great.

I feel your pain as far as the judgings go....

Cindi

Anonymous said...

Barry,

First, let me complement you on your new photograph. I think it is much more professionally done. It also captures you much better. You must show me how you did it!

Really fine job on your rock climbers. As I told you the other night, I really like this one. You did a great job in Photoshop. You made only changes that really added to the photograph.

I think that my score would have been higher than the ones that you got!

Keep shooting good ones.

Patrick

Barry Armer said...

Thanks Cindi and Larry!!

For the record my new Blog photo was taken by Mr. Larry Patrick of Bay Area Photo Club fame! Thanks Larry!!