My Dirty Dohickey
by jmritz

Comment:
Looks a bit like the end of a starter motor?

Magical Morning Mist
by jemison

Comment:
"Sometimes I had the good fortune to be in exactly the right place at the exact time that God was ready for someone to take a picture." - Ansel Adams (inaccurate wording)

"Woah." - Me

Right place. Right time. Click.

Starbucks... After Hours
by LeeD

Comment:
Really well done there.

Praise: Creativity... Reflection in the coffee mug - outstanding... Lighting - meow. Sugar on the runners of the sled give it a "used" look.

Criticism:

Missed a spot just behind the bag of sugar. I assume you saw that before.

Would have been nice if you could have lit this to highlight a few more shadows and provide a bit more depth in the sugar snow. Particularly to bring out a "snow angel" made by the one human bean.

The snow angel could have been brought out a little more also by using something to create rifts. You can sometimes make sugar stick together by using moist air and dry air. That's getting pretty tricky though. This isn't a major issue, it could just be lying there. I've done it (in snow, not sugar)

The snowman comes in a bit of a different colour. I wonder if you tried making it more snowmanlike by rolling it around in the sugar. You might have considered adding some white flour or baking soda to the mix as well if you were having problems with making stuff stick to the balls of styrofoam.

Super idea guy! I wish I was that creative :)

Oriental Mystic
by librodo

Comment:
Man Librodo, next time I go to Thailand, I want to meet YOU! Actually, I want to meet Pupae, but it would be cool to see a little of what you see too.

I wonder, why is her name in plural? I give out lots of English names to my students as well. I am wondering if perhaps it is based on her Thai name?

You are seriously amazing. Not to mention that you got this at 1/15th. Oy!

Missing you...
by Mircea

Comment:
Totally amazed how crisp your hand looks having sat for 10 seconds.

Beauty and the Beast
by Gatorguy

Comment:
That's not dangerous! This would be way more effective if she was naked.

oh. Right.

Uhm. Yikes?

Neat idea.

Looking In
by stormy

Comment:
In concurrence with Jutilda. WOW!

I had a look at some of the other pictures in your portfolio and well, WOW! You've got one amazing eye girl!

I'm going to go off and say wow some more times now. Thanks for posting and letting me know some of the amazing stuff possible with the S2.

DP
by stare_at_the_sun

Comment:
What is interesting about this picture is that it almost captures a "floating in midair" kind of feel. I wonder what would have happened if you could have achieved a black background by using a more light-absorbing fabric or something, but also raised the Dr Pepper up a little on some other type of object. A narrow glass with a couple of peices of gum or something would work fine.

I like the light. I don't like the reflection on the floor. I also thing it might be possible to not do the anti-reflective BG and just raise the glass up and maybe try to find a way to make the floor look more like a wall?

This isn't really that bad. I look forward to seeing your 5.3 and 6.0 entries.

Sippin' in September
by BeckyKellerman

Comment:
I downloaded this and tried to do something with Photoshop. I was unable to get even a remotely appealing image...

I can only asusme that you are possibly fairly new to taking low-light pictures. My suggestion would be to take this pic one step at a time. I AM fairly new to taking pictures myself, but I find that I can usually get what I want by taking the picture one step at a time. This means one step for composition, one step for focus, and one step for lighting. These are probably the most important and most simple aspects of your pictures. There is actually a lot more to them than pointing and hitting the shutter button.

Here are the three steps as I see them with your pepsi can and the firelight.

Composition: Try to find a place that I could put the pepsi can where it will have some firelight and share the frame with a rock to bring in the camping feel. The pepsi can would take up enough of the frame that it could be considered a major element. Part of this step would be finding a suitable location for the camera where it could rest and allow me some consistency from shot to shot.

Focus: In this light, this would be a major issue. This would take maybe 5 or six test shots and I would need to either use Manual focus or AF lock, whatever is present in your camera.

Lighting: This is an balance between shutter speed and available light. This is a major challenge. Flash light on a pepsi can will create a series of harsh reflections. That's not necessarily bad, but it might necessitate having a longer exposure to allow the light from the fire to build up. If you use flash, you also have to remember that flash has a limited range (the above pic looks like you might be out of this range, using zoom, but I could be wrong). I would move in closer and put a little tissue or something over the flash to diffuse it. Others have had good success with using a plastic spoon. I would start experimenting with 3 second exposure with no flash to see how things looked naturally, then add the flash in after to see if it improved matters. This lighting choice would likely require the fire to be removed from the picture. If you wanted the fire in the picture as well, things get a lot more complicated.

Hope this is helpful to you. I'm not intending this to be a manual, nor as an indicator of what is right. I am merely trying to show you the type of thought process that needs to go into difficult lighting shots like this. If you want to get angry at me, feel free to vent in a PM.

late night stop
by theverythoughtofyou

Comment:
OK, definitely missing something here. Here is the workflow I use in Photoshop. I imagine it is the same in Photoshop Elements and anything else that has some basic photo editing abilities:

Crop Image to desired composition.
Menu: Image - Image Size (don't worry about dpi, just set the largest dimension to 640, the rest is done for you)
Menu: File - Save for Web (there is a quality slider in PS that allows you to control JPG compression so you end up with a file as close to 150KB as possible.

That's it. Others who are more advanced resize down to around 100kb and do a final pass with USM, but I don't. It shows too :)