I would like to thank Strobist…
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 11:45pm
… because without his lunchbox technique, last night at the camera club would not have been as good.
Being the first Tuesday of the month it was a judging night. The topic was “Still life” and the judge was Adrian Smith. It was noted that while the number of entries were lower than normal, they were even lower than expected for a competition with a topic (compared to an “open” competition) as still life can be particularily difficult.
I had entered four images, two prints and two digital, so when the judging began I didn’t know what to expect. As it quickly became clear that Adrian has a preference for diagonals and that the photo needed to tell a story, my expectations fell.
I was wrong.
This image pretty much follows Strobist’s technique to the letter:
As it was my second favourite image of those stress balls (my favourite would have worked square, but I had already cut the mount for 3:2) I got it printed. It received a highly commended award.
On the same night I experimented with all sorts of lighting and I thought this one using direct lighting came out quite well:
As I didn’t like it quite as much as the sport one (and I didn’t want to enter two prints that were pretty much the same) I entered it as a digital image, where it received a merit award.
While looking around for inspiration for still life I played around with various arrangements of the items I use to cut out the photo mounts and ended up with this:
I printed this out and it also recieved a merit.
By the time I got around to selecting my second digital image I had run out of ideas, so I grabbed one of my small Lego sets and shot it against a white background:
I like it, but it doesn’t really grab me. It didn’t grab the judge either and this didn’t earn any awards.
So, for a topic that I was not confident about I ended up with three awards. I am happy, except now I have to wait a month to find out about the images I submitted tonight, and I need to start finding images now for the following month’s competition: “Blue”
Tagged with: photos, waverley camera club