Had this picture in mind from the beginning but somehow it was harder than I thought to make it :o) Finally though after 60 shots, from all angels, I decided this would be the one I would send because it shows the most details of the man working.
Tried to make it not to dark, but I had to darken it a bit because it is daylight almost all night here in Iceland now..
Details. Had the shutter open for a second to get some movement in the "fire"... no flash then..
PW. Darkened the picture, added some heat and some red color, burned out some details in the background (first time I use the burning tool in a challange)... and finally I added some light with curves....
Statistics
Place: 28 out of 158 Avg (all users): 6.3182 Avg (commenters): 7.7000 Avg (participants): 6.0476 Avg (non-participants): 6.4690 Views since voting: 1559 Views during voting: 321 Votes: 176 Comments: 13 Favorites: 0
Camera Work/Technical: Excellent! You did a fantastic job, especially considering the 1 second exposure, keeping the worker in focus while he was grinding metal. I like your choice of white balance here, giving the photograph a very moody, warm feel.
Lighting: Also very well done. Your setup works very well here, keeping just enough detail to make this a very interesting photograph. The sparks provide great light of their own, while the worker and background have just enough light to keep the eye moving around the frame.
Composition/Content: This is the only area where I'd like to see just a little bit of improvement. I think that the sparks trail too much off the right side of the frame. It provides for a very strong leading line that leads the viewer right out of the image. Allowing us to see more of the terminal ends of the sparks would have added some to your score, in my opinion.
My Opinion: I believe that you met the challenge very well. Between the flying sparks and the sweating worker, there is no doubt that this represents heat. Nicely envisioned and terrifically executed. With a slight composition change, this would could have broken the top ten. Congrats on a strong, top thirty finish.
A great shot, and would have done better in the environmental portrait challenge imho (though will probably be proved wrong) first pass was a six, bumping to an eight.
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