[Capture Challenge] Charge your battery and take some photos

I guess I’m weird – I like the second (non-sheep) the best! :slight_smile:

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Perhaps you could do something with the catch light in the eye?

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I had another look at this one, and semi-accidentally brightened the whole shot - and liked it! Different mood…

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Sunset Sentinels

Silhouetted bald (and bare!) cypress trees stand as if watching the sky grow dark over Iatt Lake in central Louisiana. I like the gradation of color and tone from dark metallic grey-blue in the foreground through warm solar orange and on to a nearly grey sky. Plus, the cloud was perfectly placed.

ART 1.21.1

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When you see these

you know, spring ain’t fare

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Love that image! I wish I could frame it and hang it on my wall — seriously! I think the people in the image help give it persective and a story.

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I couldn’t charge the battery in my Pentax Z20 ;). But it’s in good shape!

Ilford HP5+ film, home developed in ID-11. Camera scanned with slide copier, Sigma 70-300mm and Sony Nex5r.
Inverted with negadoctor in darktable, a little contrast added with sigmoid.

Most images taken yesterday afternoon, developed that evening and scanned today. Now that’s a turnaround. :wink:







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Nice and crisp

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Thanks. :slight_smile: I still haven’t mastered developing… but quite happy with these. No sharpening in post btw.


A flower again. Just, please, don’t ask the name :slightly_smiling_face:

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Got some beautiful colors this morning.

20min. later

These are pretty much the colors as seen.

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A lonely buoy, taken earlier. Developed today.

Yes, I’m lazy. Sorry for that. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Speaking as an ex-sailor, this isn’t a good example of a starboard hand buoy. The colour is way off, it should look more like this one:

image

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Breezy warm February day at Valentine Lake

I’ll be definitely surprised if we don’t have at least a bit more cold / cool weather before it turns warm for good, but it was warm and nice today (reached 81F). In fact it almost makes me a little wary that we might be headed for another long, hot summer. Hopefully not and it’s a couple of days, after all. It seems the transitions from one major season to another (i.e., winter & summer, since we usually have no significant spring and fall) have gone from being sine waves to being stuttering square waves… :slight_smile:

Anyway – It was a broken cloudy sky with intermittent sunlight and near constant breeze at Valentine Lake in central Louisiana. I shot this through a 10-stop ND filter to smooth the (very textured) water. There are more than a few blurred grass fronds and tree limbs. Ideally I wanted to get some grass laid over horizontally by a ground-level breeze (for an obviously windy shot) but never caught it. It happened a time or two, but not where I was ready.

There’s not much spring color yet (it’s February, for Pete’s sake) but buds are showing all over the place. There’s even a tiny bit of dry / burnt fall color in the far distance that somehow managed to hang on.

At first glance this wasn’t much of a composition but the more I arranged and looked I started to see unifying elements:

  • The two quasi-circular shapes (red). In particular I like the way the little pine sapling in the top circle points to the center like an arrow head.

  • The repeated rows of dead shore grass getting lighter and lighter toward the distance (yellow)

  • The mirrored angles of the leaning tree and midground trees (purple)

annotated

Without the smooth water there are no reflections and the sense of depth really flattens down.

I was going to walk around a while and look for something else to shoot, but the broken clouds changed to a “softbox” white cirrus overcast. Plus, I was getting hungry.

And besides – This …gentleman… walked right by me along the trail, with my camera on a tripod, etc., then walked around the little inlet and stopped in the middle of my shot and started fishing.

To be clear, he had every right to be there just as much as I or anyone else. But you know, when he was fishing from the pier, I didn’t stomp down around on it, slap the water or scare the fish away. But he seemed perfectly happy to stop dead in my shot. Just after this shot he walked out of frame to the right, but left his bag and other stuff sitting on the ground in front of me.

…whatever…

Canon T8i / 850D, Canon EF 70-200mm F/4L USM, Ice ND 1000 filter, ART 1.2.1 and Affinity Photo 2

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And yet, as a ‘street photographer,’ everyone runs away when I get my camera out — the irony. LOL. :wink:

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Is it like this? :laughing:

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DX, at that… :crazy_face:

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Haa-haaaaa! :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: Indeed. Maybe I should swap my gear out for something a little less… house-sized? :laughing:

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There was fog in last night’s forecast (for this morning) so I set my alarm for too-early-for-Saturday and made the ~40 minute drive to the Catahoula National Wildlife Reserve. As expected, the fog precluded any visible sunrise, so I drove the nine mile “wildlife drive” looking for compositions. I found a few but to be honest most of them suffer from visual clutter.

This area has yielded a handful of (what I consider) decent images, but past those it gets thin really fast. There’s a lot of tangled growth at the waters edge and while (given decent weather conditions, which are kinda rare) it can be a not-unpleasant place for a visit or two, it becomes very “same” very quickly. If I used a boat it might be a little better, but probably not too much so.

At any rate, here are a few shots.

Dark path to …somewhere?
I tried warming the midtones a little to pull the fog back from blue, but it made it more welcoming and less mysterious. So I like this one better with the cold fog color.

Fog on the bayou
One of the few not subject to clutter. Actually it was even less obvious in person (this is contrast-enhanced to a degree). It made focusing pretty difficult.

Gnarly, man!
I really like the tree on the left, but the right hand tree(s) interferes with every possible angle. There’s just no way to get one without the other… and on top of that there’s no good background.

Green water?
Yeah that’s the real color of the water. I’ve seen brown water, I’ve seen black water, but not this shade of green (in a bayou, at least). I also like the lower trunk of the left tree but it’s difficult to isolate. If the water comes up any more it might help by covering more of the bank, not sure.

Almost OK
I like the overall shape of this tree, the symmetrical nature of the split, the almost-mirrored limbs, etc. But between the foreground bank clutter and the tree to the right it’s impossible to isolate. Maybe if I had (literally) an 8 foot step ladder…?

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