52 weeks: Week 48 wrapup

© 2010 Simon Hucko

Only a day late this week. Phew. This was the *only* photo I took last week. I thought about cheating and putting something up that I took earlier, because frankly this is pretty much a snapshot, but oh well. They can't all be winners.

Self shots like this are pretty easy to set up, especially if you have a remote (which I highly recommend). I set exposure manually and checked the histogram before popping the camera on the tripod. I guesstimated the hyperfocal distance and set that manually, too, so that everything would be in focus. The trick for these wide angle "people standing in front of stuff" shots is for the people to get as close as possible to the camera so that they fill more of the frame. If we had stood on the porch, we probably would have been about half the size, and our faces wouldn't have shown up very well in the photo. I raised the tripod up pretty high to eliminate some of the perspective distortion, so that the top of the house didn't converge too much. (I corrected it even further in Lightroom to help get rid of that "wide angle" look.) The 2 second timer on the remote let me get my hand back in my pocket after tripping the shutter. 6 shots later, we were done. Quick edit for contrast in color, then off to my parents for their Christmas newsletter. All told, it took less than 20 minutes from getting out the camera to clicking "send" on the e-mail. It's not award winning art, but it's a nice photo of my wife and me with our new house, and is something we'll be glad to have years down the line.

My pick this week is "Big skies over Manhattan" by chofler:



I really like where she placed the skyline in the image - the low horizon and wide angle really show off the clouds. There's an interesting play of light and shadow on the buildings, too, I'm guessing as a result from the scattered clouds. I think this would have even more impact printed large, as you lose a bit of detail at web res.

4 weeks to go!

~S

[title of blog] on flickr