This idea popped into my head about 2 days before the challenge closed, but was executed at the very last moment... It is inspired by a coffee advertisement on South African TV of years ago (white or black?).
Thanks to Jorik for helping me set up this experiment, as well as his house and props. (he also programmed the LED display)
The "bomb" is a bundle of crumpled newspapers taped with masking tape. The red and black cables are speaker wires (still attached to a speaker) which were taped to the tape-ball with some more tape. The timer is just a loose LED display hard-wired to display "01", and duct-taped to the bomb, powered by the green and white wire.
Lighting was done by a normal ceiling light + SB600 bounced of the ceiling (to the right).
Raw conversion, exposure compensation, gamma, contrast, tweaks to the colour temperature and saturation, removed hot pixels.
Statistics
Place: 22 out of 127 Avg (all users): 5.9780 Avg (commenters): 6.8182 Avg (participants): 5.6279 Avg (non-participants): 6.0863 Views since voting: 1332 Views during voting: 364 Votes: 182 Comments: 14 Favorites: 0
Francois,
,
Congratulations on one of your top 3 scoring shots to date. Overall, it's a good shot that needs just a bit more to take it over a 6.
Technically: While you are very sharp in some areas, others, such as the hand are a bit soft. I can see by your ISO and shutter speed that you were pushing to get this much light in the direction you wanted. However, a higher aperature f8-f11 may have helped, or afaster shutter speed or even backing the camera up a bit to get more focus on the hand.
The coloring is a bit red, even on the face of a nervous bomb technician. More light on the surface holding the bomb would have given less of a "floating" feeling.
Emotionally: I like the intensity in the eyes. The mouth expression feels a bit off to me as I'm not entirely sure what it is supposed to be. I also think that because the bomb is facing forward and the man is facing sideways that the connection between the man and bomb is not as strong as it could be. I'd like to be scared spitless for him. Instead, I feel like I'm getting a staged retelling. Changing the angle of the bomb would probably help, and adding the sweat would really get us sweating.
Meeting the challenge: You definitely met the challenge. Many people related to the image concept and had some very good comments.
Keep up the good work, refine the details and we should be seeing you in the high scores often.
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