So after having my Demotivational entry up all week and stressing about if it was legal or not I've now gone and changed my mind at the last minute.
This picture was inspired by this wonderful image by Techo. I had always wanted to recreate it and now with lots of dandelions around now seemed the perfect time.
Having collected a bunch of dandelions in the very windy weather we've had this week (easier said than done) I then arranged them on a frosted glass door I'd removed from an IKEA cupboard in my office, which was suspended on a weight lifting cage in the garage. Lit from underneath using a 500 watt builders lamp with a white sheet drapped between the light and the glass door in a kind of U shape to achieve the graduation in the background.
Post Processing was some fairly agressive changes to the RAW image in Adobe CameraRaw 4.5 to change contrast, saturation, black levels and brightness and exposure. This was alot of unscientific fiddling (I'm sure other PS novices will relate to this approach) until it looked ok.
Then in Elements 7 crop and much more 'fiddling' with sliders for levels, saturation, highlights etc etc all on the background image, no layers. Finally lots of experimentation with noise reduction, sharpening and very subtle gaussian blur to try and control the noise created with all the changes without losing too much detail. It was all very suck it and see until it looked like I wanted it too.
I like the resulting image and I think the quote works really well alongside it. I hope the voters agree.
I expect a heap of amazing shots in this one but I'l stil hope for a PB @ 6.1+ (how's that for setting yourself up for a fall!)
Post Challenge
WOW! What an amazing feeling. Thank you so much for all the comments and votes. Its been a long long week and with the scores thread so quiet I was wondering what today would bring.
Thanks again
Cheers, Paul.
Statistics
Place: 2 out of 134 Avg (all users): 6.9404 Avg (commenters): 8.1364 Avg (participants): 6.9649 Avg (non-participants): 6.9317 Views since voting: 8501 Views during voting: 448 Votes: 218 Comments: 44 Favorites: 14 (view)
another fantastic saying .. i'm very into pithy sayings by the way .. totally loved the small darkroom known as fear, and this one .. well, its so true ..
another superb visual respresentation .. you do these extraordinarily well ..
many congratulations on the red, a pb and something very beautiful that it would benefit us all to keep remembering .. !! ... :)
Excellent photo composition for this, i like the overall placement, the diagonal composition, the scattered parts. it all works for me in that sense.
You chose the text and border colour from the photo, which normally is exactly the right thing to do. However, in this case, maybe is makes everything a little too brown. Would have to experiment with the colours to see if something worked better........
The phrase is great, matches the photo, however the text size is too small, and I don't think it should be capitalised. Maybe script in a larger font would have worked so much better. A great photo for this, but the overall presentation of this is not quite as good.
One of my ribbon picks - I like the muted, duo-tones, the sentiment, and the composition (not to mention how tough it is to get those seeds in motion) well done.
I could see this as a poster...great tones...I wonder from a desktop publishing stance if the tagline would have been better in white...just a thought 8 (Good Luck)
In my belief there are more things that contribute for a great motivational/de-motivational poster:
Idea/creativity:10
Quality of the photo:10
Artistic viewpoint:10
Frame/borders:10
Appealence of the font:10
Average:10 one of my favs on this contest
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