OUTBACK
by DrJOnes

Comment:
Great lighting, mood, tone, crispness, and composition. This would work great as a watch advertisement, imo. I hope you didn't suffer because the watch wasn't shot macro-style. (9)

U.S. Naval Observatory - Flagstaff, AZ
by jperez1690

Comment:
Thank you for all the valuable input. I did worry about that vertical perspective making the observatory, trees and other building appear to be leaning toward center. Part of me liked the way it looked like everything was reaching for the stars, but it also tempted to be distracting.

KDO, the bulk of the foreground lighting in the image came from moonlight that was giving a beautiful glow to the whole facility. I had to use masks to separate the sky from the foreground to boost the contrast enough to give the impression of what I could see in the sky, at the same time the moon was bathing everything else. Based on some good comments here, I probably opened things up a bit too much. I worry sometimes that I make my images too dark...so I think I overcompensated.

Thanks again!

The Drake
by banmorn

Comment:
I enjoy the composition in this image. The foreground building roof diving into the left third of the image, and then the roof point at the very bottom shooting the angle straight up into the main building, and off into the ornate negative space of the blue sky. The blue and orange-yellow make a nice, battling contrast of color. I think the only thing I miss is a focal point that works with the strong lines.

Nice shot.

Snowden Park
by dixonp1

Comment:
Beautifully rich and colorful image.

I could be mistaken, but it looks like a soften filter was used. I'm a little torn as to whether I like that effect here or not.

The Great Banini
by jperez1690

Comment:
Schoff, and anyone else who wondered about the red pepper...

I had considered doing the shot without the pepper, but felt that for the perspective I was after, it needed something else to balance the shot in a few ways.

1.) Color. The black background with the yellowish fruit had good contrast, but didn't offer the brilliant splash of color I thought a circusy theme would need.

2.) Odd number. I tend to believe that when there are distinct objects showing in a composition, that an odd number is better than an even. That's not always the case, but here, I really felt that the peel and the banana/melon combo needed a third party. So in comes the pepper.

3.) Layout. The peel and banana-melon looked a little flat by themselves, and I thought the pepper helped add some punch and dynamics to the composition.

If I had shot this on something other than a flat black background, I think that all 3 of these preceding reasons might not have been as big of a factor, since background items could have provided other compositional bits to satisfy me.

Finally...4.) Story. Since my metephor was a human canonball, I thought that having The Great Banini fly through a hurtling ring of fire (or in the fruit world, a red bell pepper) would add to the 'daredevil' part of the story.

Of course, I know a lot of this is a matter of taste. And based on a couple of comments, that the red pepper was more distracting than interesting for some people's taste. I think I still personally disagree with that, but I DO appreciate that people brought it up, because it did make me consider other ways I might handle the shot were I to do it again. Thanks again to everyone for all their thoughts!

gun1.jpg
by cbonsall

Comment:
oh WOW! Nice shot. What was your shutter speed on that bad boy?

I Love Bananas
by Cantique

Comment:
Ann, what a clever shot, with great exposure. The fact that you got such a clean image, non-tripod, at 1/10 second is incredible. I'm also encouraged to see how well ISO 400 came out. Congratulations on the red ribbon!

New and Improved Packaging
by dsa157

Comment:
David, very cool! Congratulations on the blue. The bionic insertion of the zipper is really smooth, seamless and believable. Excellent concept and execution.

The Great Banini
by jperez1690

Comment:
Sweeeeeeeet!

There were some great pictures in this challenge. So I'm stoked that this shot did as well as it did.

I learned a few things in the process...

1. Dry ice screams when held tightly in tongs
2. Wife screams when she sees what you've done to the bedroom...and the fruit

erm...

sorry for any offense given with phalic overtones, by the way. I knew at the outset that was going to be a pretty inseparable feature of what I was trying to put together. But I swear, man, I was totally going for the circus theme as the main thrus...uh...feature.

m'kay...

So there were some other things I learned:

1. Soft Natural Light. I have squat for light equipment. I was trying to light this travesty with my wife's make-up mirror thing, and every shot was lousy with hot spots and horrible color. So out of desperation, I stepped up the exposure to 30 seconds and just used the ambient light that was filtering in through a north facing window in the room. It gave everything a smooth soft-box lighting.

2. Smoke Effects. The theory of puddling water in shallow, oddly contoured fruit and plunking little pieces of dry ice in it for smoke visuals is sadly flawed. You get about 2 seconds of heavy mist before the bottom of the dry ice chunks get a protective coat of ice water, or the puddle freezes over and the mist dwindles away. Which leads to...

3. Fudging on Long Exposures. Because I wasn't getting the smoke effect I needed over the 30 second exposure, I had to find a way of keeping the dry ice and water in constant agitated contact. So I grabbed one of those little plastic syringes you get with kid's medicine (because the only squirt bottle we have is decrepit and won't squirt a stream any narrower than 45 degrees :P ). So for the first 20 seconds of the exposure, I filled and squirted the syringe into the banana cavity I think 3 times. That was enough to keep the little dry ice pebbles tumbling around and steaming up really nice. I know that my hand and the syringe would enter the frame every time, but I tried to keep my arm moving and firing from different angles each time so it didn't expose any one part of the frame too much. And because the light was dim and exposure long, it worked.

4. Canon EOS Rebel noise (lack thereof). I have been really impressed with how well this camera handles noise over long exposures. So far, I've taken 90 second exposures at 100 ISO, and haven't encountered any noise problems so far.

Thanks for all the comments!

It's a Boy!
by MotoCycleBoi

Comment:
This is such a cool idea. I have no idea what you used for the newborn there...some sort of squash? But it's perfect. It has that slithery amniotic sac look to it which really completes the picture. Great clarity. Exposure seems a little hot on the brightest part of the banana.