I went to extremes for this shot!! I actually built a cardboard wind tunnel, made a laminator, made a smoke generation jar (that I only exploded once), built the tubing system and build up blue and red LED boards.
Unfortunately, I ran out of batteries in the last setup shots and didnt really get the picture I wanted. So I had to go back to one of my setup shots and clean it up. The RAW image has lint everywhere that I cleaned just as the batteries died. So, I had to do a dilate and lot of smudging. I adjusted the contrast and in the end it came out pretty good. I think I will try again with some new batteries (smoke generator) tomorrow even after the challenge just so I have the picture I wanted.
Thanks for looking!
Oh yeah, BTW I am an engineer. :)
Tim
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Place: 152 out of 159 Avg (all users): 4.2385 Avg (commenters): 5.0000 Avg (participants): 4.1512 Avg (non-participants): 4.2876 Views since voting: 1121 Views during voting: 403 Votes: 239 Comments: 9 Favorites: 0
Greetings from the Critique Club: I have been assigned your photo to critique and here are my thoughts:
Personal Reaction: Before I looked to see which challenge you had entered, my first reaction to the shot was favorable. Then as I understood the challenge and reflected on how well it met the challenge, my reaction to the photo was diminished a bit.
Composition: The composition is fine. You have offset the car in the frame slightly which strengthens the composition. I might have moved the car slightly to the left giving it “room to run” in the frame. You got some comments about lowering the point of view and I think that might have helped some. At least with a set-up shot, you have the freedom to try different angles.
Technicals: Focus is good, DoF is good. Colors are good but a dark gray (vs. black) background might have added drama. The dark car disappears into the background and the overall exposure is so dark that I can’t see many car details. I think if your setup hadn’t failed, you might have got more smoke and that might have also overcome some of the exposure problems. But without the perfect smoke, you might have been able to improve it by boosting brightness a little.
Conclusions: Thanks for including the context of your shot in the Comments. I am stunned at the lengths you went to in the set up. And I’m sorry it failed before you got that final shot. I think voters in general may have missed the connection to the Wind challenge theme. With a fully operating setup, it might have been obvious. I would be interested in seeing your reshoot with fully charged batteries, compared to this one.
As always, this is my personal opinion. Feel free to PM me if you’d like further dialog.
I feel that this is supposed to look life sized, but is a model. The front lines of red light are nice and follow the hood. The rest of the shot is average.5
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