I wanted to try something a bit fun with matches. It's only now that I'm entering the details I note I had ISO 800. A lower setting would have made this easier as it was hard not to get bits of me showing in the wrong places (hands behind the eyes etc).
My wife helped me by covering up the lens at key points so I could move the match to begin another line. This way there were no trails between eyes etc. Each attempt took two matches as they burnt down too quickly (one for the eyes and mouth and then I quickly lit another for the face outline). I doubt this will score high (I'm predicting a sub 5) but I had fun doing it!
Editing Steps: Copnvert from RAW
Curves
Adjust Hue & Saturation
Gaussian Blur
Crop
Resize
Save for web
I considered editing to join up the circle at the bottom and perhaps center the eyes & mouth by after contacting the admins they advised that both of these edits would be major given the context of the image.
Post Challenge: Check your camera settings - the high ISO was not needed and probably caused me more trouble in this case. I also had a different idea of what was 'cool' in this challenge as I thought the idea of 'painting' a smiley with fire like I did would be good but voters wanted to see that is was really a flame (it was)
Statistics
Place: 154 out of 160 Avg (all users): 3.8750 Avg (commenters): 4.3846 Avg (participants): 3.6026 Avg (non-participants): 4.0614 Views since voting: 1346 Views during voting: 352 Votes: 192 Comments: 15 Favorites: 5 (view)
Simple. Cute. Fun. Not much I can say to offer improvements as the image is as I said simple - not to make or anything, just very basic and bare bones. I like it. I'm giving a 6
ETA: Ok I will expand a bit. The fun of the image is let down by the fact that I can't tell you made the face with fire. I assume it is fire but I can't tell. The fact that it looks almost like an after thought also in my mind hurts the image. I think the idea would be better suited for painting with light.
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