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05/10/2005 11:04:54 PM · #1 |
Well, I've finally finished writing this. My second DPChallenge entry did significantly better than the first (of course, it couldn't get much worse), but didn't go so far as to actually do well, something I found rather disappointing.
What I submitted:
You can click on the shot to see notes on how it was done.
Edited version based on comments:
Alternate, unsubmitted shot:
What I was trying to do:
I wanted to have dramatic lighting on the ball, but have practically nothing else in the shot draw the eye, despite giving context, in something of a compromise with the classic idea of minimalism. The problem with classic minimalism is that it is (to me) amazingly tedious stuff. I wanted something memorable, with a single subject and just enough context so a viewer could work out the scene. Ideally, the ball would have ended up at a Golden Mean point, but it was difficult enough just getting the thing into the shot, lit properly, with the text facing the camera, that after keeping my volunteers away from playing for the better part of an hour, I finally packed up with what I had, and found out that my best shot just couldn't be cropped into that position.
What happened:
Commenters either loved it or hated it, it seems. I got my first favorite out of this, from another ping pong players, but it came out at 49%. Several people really liked the lighting, and wanted to know how it was set up (covered in the image comments), but there was a recurring theme that the scene was too dark, and a few people apparently couldn't figure out what was going on at all. I suspect a lot of miscalibrated monitors to have been involved, as I keep my own monitor slightly on the dark side, and it was plenty light enough for me to make out everything in the scene. I re-edited the shot to brighten it, and looking at the two side by side, I personally find my original to be the much better shot. I'm quite curious to find out what DPChallenge members reading this think.
What I learned about DPChallenge:
Many people are probably viewing very far on the dark side of the scale, and I really wish they'd make use of that brightness calibration chart below each image.
If there's just enough visible to show that there's something there, viewers will want to see it clearly, even if you don't really want them to be looking at it. I'm not sure if that's a DPC thing or a general audience thing.
Solid-color, plain backgrounds with nothing but negative space often scored very well, even if they were harshly bright, so apparently DPChallenge scorers are absolutely unbothered by large expanses of unbroken negative space, even if it doesn't convey any sense of motion or context to an image.
Very educational to me was how much better the two shots with similar concepts scored:
This scored 6.078 and came in 46th place. This was a clean shot with similar lighting, but the color mesh of yellow against green was better than I could arrange with a light blue table tennis table, and with the large expanse of solid green, ClickNSee didn't have to darken his context to keep the eye from being drawn away from the subject. The lighting makes it a memorable shot. I can see why this one did better.
The other shot, however, I can't, except insofar as that voters really, really hate when there is context they can't see clearly:
I scored this one a 5, myself, but it came out at 62nd place with 5.987. Hm. I guess that means I should give up on trying to use dark backgrounds for separation in challenges.
What I learned about photography and editing:
A 580EX flash, even stopped down, is amazingly bright. So bright as to be almost useless directly at close range, in fact. The backhand alternate shot was taken via bounce flash, but that left it with even lighting, which caused me to reject it. My actual submission was taken by slave flash aimed not at the ball, but at the underside of the table, leaking enough light to illuminate the ball. If you're having a problem blowing your highlights with a flash, try mostly blocking the flash with another object, and let the remaining angular leakage illuminate the subject.
When dealing with resized images, sharpening is best done in two passes, an initial sharpen before you resize at full strength, and then a very light sharpening afterwards as well. This seems to work much better than trying to do all sharpening after the resize, and the resize causes some blur of its own. Note for those about to pick up Photoshop CS2: using the Smart Sharpen set to Lens Blur, 2.0-3.0 pixels, and 100% seems about perfect for initial sharpening, and Lens Blur of 0.6 pixels at 50% seems perfect for post-resize sharpening. This may be lens dependent.
What I learned about myself:
This turned out to be a lot more disappointing than my first entry. With my first entry, I was more horrified at what I'd submitted than disappointed in the natural hammering that it took. It was, in fact, an awful shot, and while it was a bit embarassing that I didn't see that immediately, there wasn't really any emotional attachment to it. I really, really liked my 40mm Forehand shot. There were a few minor glitches to it (ball position, good contrast outlining the paddle, but not the arm, not a perfect connection of the lines on the two halves of the table), but they were little things, and with the exception of one person who noted the ball position as being too high (and I agree somewhat, except that it couldn't be fixed), nobody commented on the rest of the minor flaws, and I wonder how much they contributed to a lower score, and how much I'm just overcritical of my own work. Not being able to present it in such a way that it did well stung more than I expected, though I was pleased to get a favorite out of it. I'll probably just have to grow a thicker skin. It has deterred me somewhat from submitting, however; I look at my shot for the Triangles challenge, compare it to this one, and just don't find it compelling enough to enter.
In some challenges, I see things completely at odds with the rest of the voters. Half of the top ten shots I scored 5 or below, including one ribbon. One of my 10s is in the bottom 40%. Comparing my scores to how the image came out is completely random. I have both high and low scores scattered throughout the entire range of final values in this challenge.
My favorite underdogs:
I'm going to try to set a tradition for my post-mortems by linking to my favorite images that scored in the bottom 40%:
This got one of my 10s. I was laughing so hard I couldn't continue scoring for a little while, and that was even before I had a chance afterwards to read the description, which set me off again.
I loved the colors in this, and thought the use of negative space was just perfect, at least for anyone who's had an animal slowly nose its way into where it wasn't supposed to be. Amusingly, a lot of things that commenters didn't like, I *did* like, and vice versa. I thought the color was a good part of the image, as opposed to one who thought it would be better in black and white. I also thought the shadow fit in well, and that a white background would have been much worse. Go figure. This got one of my 9s.
Previous post-mortems:
* Rock Paper Scissors
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05/10/2005 11:56:23 PM · #2 |
Slight update: I just realized that the Critique Club showed up yesterday for this image, which was nice, since I'd been reading that they don't get to very many images. After contemplating the new comment for a bit, I wonder how many people have just never played or watched ping pong. From the perspective of a player, that's one hell of a tense action shot; a ball bouncing that high over the net is going to get absolutely clobbered unless the spin is very strong, and you can just see the player setting up to do so. :-)
This means that images of less common sports will do less well than images of more common sports, just on recognition/interest factor, though, which is the opposite of what I would have expected (I would have thought novelty to be a draw). Hm, again. |
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