Dirt Devil in Hyperdrive
by Alex_Europa

Comment by KarenNfld:
Pretty neat.

Nickelback
by Alex_Europa

Comment by JulietNN:
hi from teh shot club

I am really surprised that this finished so low. I liked this very much.

Artistically, it is very clever. Technically there are a couple of things that are wrong. I think for this challenge having the face of the coin showing up a little more would have helped. There is a lot of grain and some sensor dust going on.

One tip for the blac and white is to saturate or use selective colours and play around with those before you change it to black and white, you will be surprised at what details come out this way. Unsharp mask would have also helped to bring out some details.

the shallow DOF is a great choice for this.

Yo-Spiff gave you an excellent comment below.

I would love to see you redo this shot.

Dirt Devil in Hyperdrive
by Alex_Europa

Comment by my-planet:
Great idea! Very tripy.

Nickelback
by Alex_Europa

Comment by bspurgeon:
OK. I gave this a 4, basically because it met the challenge topic. 4 is my minimum vote for those that meet the topic. I do like the abstract feel, but as a whole I'm not drawn in to the photo. BW was a good choice. As far as processing, the halo around the nickel is too prominent, and it is legal to clone/heal sensor dust in basic.

Dirt Devil in Hyperdrive
by Alex_Europa

Comment by RobMcGee:
good idea, just so many distracting reflections on the devil, either include the whole hand or clip it off (off the picture, not off the arm), 5

Nickelback
by Alex_Europa

Comment by Yo_Spiff:

Originally posted by Alex_Europa: I want to give a big thank you to those 37 of you that thought it really sucked, but didn't let me know why.

We have one of our resident programming nerds working on a javascript that will register an electric shock through the mouse for any vote of 3 or less without a comment.

Dirt Devil in Hyperdrive
by Alex_Europa

Comment by VitaminB:
This reminds me of the scene in Spaceballs when Dark Helmet takes the spacecraft to 'ridiculous speed'. :D

Nickelback
by Alex_Europa

Comment by Alex_Europa:
Wow, I must say that I'm extremely disappointed with this finish. I thought the creativity would've at least got me a 5, but clearly the obvious choice was the better one in this case.

I REALLY feel that there should be a requirement to leave a comment with a score of a 3 or worse. I want to give a big thank you to those 37 of you that thought it really sucked, but didn't let me know why.

Nickelback
by Alex_Europa

Comment by Yo_Spiff:
Post-vote comment:
I gave this a 4. I see some good creativity and effort in it, but it didn't come off to me with a lot of visual impact or appeal. Unfortunately, that is what most of us look for and rate an entry on. Looks like you did a long exposure and moved the nickel into the frame at some point. I popped it into PaintShop Pro to see some things, and the first thing I found was the histogram is very flat on the light end. This makes the image a bit dark and lacking dynamic range. You can see in this screenshot of my levels dialog, the histogram and the preview of the difference it made.


Some noise reduction and contrast with a high radius unsharp mask gave me this result:

Of course, my quick edit brought out a lot of other visual artifacts, but it showed those aspects that I felt were the main issues with this shot.

This is far from a snapshot, and you are certainly moving in the right direction with this effort.

Hope this helped.

Nickelback
by Alex_Europa

Comment by Tammster:
This is my favorite of the Nickelback entries.