I wasn't planning to enter the Open challenges, but an unexpectedly lame score in the Member challenge plus several DPL teammates sitting out left me little choice. I only had to overcome the minor detail of no idea at 8pm on deadline day. I was aiming for "The Shaggy Dog" but I think I wound up with Chewbacca's Daughter instead.
I've never tried this sort of thing before, but the setup wasn't so hard. I shot through a hole cut in the bottom of a cardboard box with black paperboard flaps over the opening, top and bottom. The shutter was open 15 seconds in a dark room, and I fired the strobes with a radio trigger.
Logistics was another matter altogether. Here's the drill: I place the dog, check the position through the lens, have one daughter mark the spot and try to guess where her head will need to be, hold the top flap down on the box and call out to my son to turn off the room light, try to get the dog's attention in the dark, open the shutter and fire the strobes with my other hand, then my other daughter runs in and grabs the dog while the first one jumps into place, I tell her to go high or turn slightly to the left based on what the dog did when the lights popped, hold the other flap open and fire the strobes again. It was nuts, but after 27 takes we got lucky with the alignment. It didn't occur to me until afterwards to just cover the lens and position the other daughter with the lights on. :-/
Processing: Convert from RAW, Crop, Levels, USM, Curves and clone out one hot pixel, desaturate and darken the blue and cyan channels to hide a blue ponytail. I ran another version through Noise Ninja to take care of the long exposure noise, but missed the deadline to replace this one by seconds.
Ooh, just missed two Opens in a row. I certainly can't complain though... this one started out as low as 2.52 in the early voting after getting hammered by FIVE votes of 1 right off the bat. Huh?!?!
Statistics
Place: 4 out of 143 Avg (all users): 6.6144 Avg (commenters): 8.3704 Avg (participants): 6.6230 Avg (non-participants): 6.6114 Views since voting: 5443 Views during voting: 631 Votes: 236 Comments: 46 Favorites: 2 (view)
Congratulations on your 4th placing here. Strange, a similar blend as this has been lurking in the back of my mind. I may enter it someday. However, your workmanship, as usual, is totally outstanding and the reward for the effort is self evident. Bravo!
As an FYI only, on my overly bright monitor the background is VERY color-noisy.
Your monitor is too bright. I can just barely make out some background noise (more so on the laptop if tilted at a weird angle), and I ran Noise Ninja to address that, but missed the rollover. I tried! ;-)
As an FYI only, on my overly bright monitor the background is VERY color-noisy. May have affected some of the laptop voters who have screens tilted badly. Or those with too bright monitors. It didn't hurt the score too much, though. :-)
Hey Shannon, I would have put money on this one taking out a ribbon and from my POV 'the blue'. 5 ones - I actually don't believe it - bloody morons. Congrats on the top 5 anyway. It's still a brilliant image.
Congrats with a well deserved top 5 Shannon. I bet all the 1's and low scores are from voters that thought there would be no way to accomplish the transition as you did it between the dog and your daughter in basic mode.
Can't really blame them though since it really does look like you have put two images together 'manually' and made the transition by changing the opacity selectively on the top of the dog. But the voters should always vote as if the shot is legal and leave it for the SC to decide - which as it turns out the majority of the voters luckily did.
How on earth can someone manage such an incredible mesh?
I'm afraid I have to call it out.
As a rewarw, I'll also give you 10* as a head start before the model sees what you've done.
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