Tripod mount, flash hand-held hand-triggered off-camera, sheet as backdrop tungsten light overhead. Opened shutter, dropped chips, hit flash, crossed fingers. Edited levels: dragged highlights to center of histogram and dragged down white levels to 80% or so, then scaled to size. put up a bit of unsharp mask.
Statistics
Place: 41 out of 68 Avg (all users): 4.9738 Avg (commenters): 6.5000 Avg (participants): 4.6053 Avg (non-participants): 5.0654 Views since voting: 789 Views during voting: 325 Votes: 191 Comments: 6 Favorites: 0
There are sort of two shots going on here. The top part of chips in space is pretty cool, but the lack of any fill or bounce light makes the shadows pretty inky and loses some of the nice shapes you have going on. I would have like to see all of the top boards in the frame (On these shots I shoot really loose and count on wasting a good bit of the frame, even if I burn half my pixels to get the framing I want, Its no big deal when I can only submit 800 pixels anyway).
The lower bit with the two falling boards is dominated my the backdrop and the hints of the fallen. Sadly this half is neither nor. If you had used a GOBO and screened the backdrop off so it was black, it would have been in keeping with the top. Had you had a steady low light in addition to the flash and had a longer exposure so you had the circuit boards in space with the flash, and some falling lines and them in their resting place, that would have worked.
As is, it looks like it might have been a mistake; and anything that is not blatantly clearly intended, gets hammered here. If you back light so it could be seen as a halo, people will rip it as an artifact of editing. To get a good score, I have found you have to be pretty straightforward here.
I noticed that I gave this a 6. It fulfilled the challenge, and it has some interesting stuff going on, and I do love shots that capture the element of time, so the ghosts on the floor worked for me, but seemed a bit weak. Ghostly almost.
Difficult to critique this from my perspective as I found this challenge topic to be very unappealing and didn't vote. However, just because I didn't like the topic, doesn't mean I can't find something to comment.
This must have been quite fiddly to set up and I'm sure you had to do it more than once! I'm not entirely sure if you were really trying to make it look like a space station, but if so then I guess you succeeded, since it's the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw this. Clearly your commenters also thought the same.
I can't quite put my finger on why this scored below 5. Maybe the composition is a little awkward. Surely this was a bit hit and miss if you were dropping the chips. There is a lot of 'lint', fluff or whatever you care to call it in the background. Can't tell if that's meant to be there to enhance the feeling of a moon surface, or if in fact it's not meant to be there. Either way, that may have an impact on your score. DPC voters like things clean and dust free. There is certainly 1 white speck of dust that is standing out. Now, of course, in basic editing you cannot clone the dust out since it is not sensor dust, but real physical dust, so I would have been inclined to therefore use a levels adjustment or something to darken the blacks. The dust would be more concealed this way and would have made the chips stand out a bit more.
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