I was around for the February salon too, which was nice.
Prints: Open color
Blue Bug in San German, Puerto Rico
I considered saving my highly stylized blue bug image for the upcoming Creative digital competition. However, the print turned out so well that it didn’t make sense to submit it as a digital image.
I’m glad I didn’t wait, as the judge liked the print well enough to put it in the awards with a 9.
If you are curious, the original edited image looked like this:
I think the artistic version is a lot more interesting.
High above the lodge, Lake O’Hara, British Columbia
I was sort of stymied by what to enter for my second print, so I decided to use one of the mountain images from Art-a-Whirl last year.
The judge felt some of the greens across the lake were too dark, but aside from that thought it was a pretty good print. Good enough to earn another award with a score of 8.
I’ll give the dark area another look and decide if I want to bring it out more or not – at some point it starts looking unnatural.
Digital: Night Photography
This month’s digital competition was Night Photography.
That was defined as “Photographs taken out of doors between dusk and dawn, using artificial light or long exposures, or both, as in the case of light painting.”
As usual, I couldn’t decide what type of images I wanted to submit and changed my mind a whole bunch of times.
Midway Grill
Midway Grill is an image I’ve been playing with off and on for a couple of years. It’s also one from my Art-a-Whirl postcard packet from last year. Since I’ve been looking at it for so long, it seemed it was well-past time to get some feedback on it.
The judge recommended brightening up the front of the image, which makes a lot of sense, but liked it enough to put it in the awards with another 8.
Spinning gold
I’ve been saving the images I shot at last summer’s photographing fire meet-up for a salon next year where fire is the theme. (I didn’t think about entering them in the earlier digital action photography salon, where some would have done well.) But I have several that I like, so decided it was finally time to enter one now, instead of using another state fair or city scene.
I chose this image over one I like better because it clearly shows it was taken outdoors at night (not inside somewhere).
It was a good choice, as the judge really liked it and gave me one of those elusive 10s!