This was fun to shoot! I had wanted to do this ever since my light entry. It's normally a 15min drive + 10min walk to get to the castle but in the dark it took me more like 20min to find it. Also, I slipped in a fresh cowpat and nearly crashed into the tripod... It's me on the wall with my torch, I had to run real fast and jump on the wall before the 10s delay expired. I did that 3 or 4 times then I realised that there's a 5 meter drop on the other side ;) On the plus side I saw a shooting star (shame it's not in the frame) and 3 fox cubs during the drive back. Overall I loved it! I mean, if it wasn't for DPC, I don't think I would ever have found myself by a ruined castle in the middle of nowhere at midnight!
post processing was a nightmare, I really need to learn PS properly. I used a gradient map and the channel mixer to convert to blue (it was dirty orange originally), then shadows/highlight, dodge/burn, USM, resize, USM and neatimage.
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2 commenters have noticed the artifacts around the silhouette, that's much less than I expected! I could hardly see the artifacts on my home monitor but on the supersharp TFT at work ,they're very obvious... I managed to do another version without the artifacts there
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Place: 22 out of 248 Avg (all users): 6.6100 Avg (commenters): 8.2353 Avg (participants): 6.4661 Avg (non-participants): 6.7480 Views since voting: 2345 Views during voting: 353 Votes: 241 Comments: 20 Favorites: 2 (view)
Nice shot!! Good idea that turned out very well. I would have used less sky up top, maybe to where the dark blue stops on the left (which still would have given the lighter color on the right and filled the frame better. Good work - 8
This is very cool! Excellent forms, focus, contrast, and subjuect frame. Looks a touch noisy, maybe oversaturated? Love the color tho. I don't recognize the star patterns, you must be down-under.? 9
Fabulous! Really incredible silhouette. I love the simplicity of only blue and black. Great sky, great all around.
The only think I don't like is the JPEG artifacting around the silhouette. The image is only about 50KB, you should use more of the 150KB you have and get better quality. This really distracts from the otherwise fabulous crispness and cleanness of the image. I would give a 9 or even 10 if the image was just a bit cleaner. 8
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