A Boy's Summer Friend
by kirbic

Comment by Gringo:
Oh Yeah - 8 nice work

You might work with your crop tools a little to clean up the outer edges of your photo.

Watkins04.jpg
by kirbic

Comment by Journey:
Very nice image. Nature is very, very difficult to shoot well. Any chance to get a bit more detail out of the foreground left rock?

Watkins09.jpg
by kirbic

Comment by Journey:
After reading your 'selling points' for shooting in raw, i visited your profile page and saw these pic. These are the type of pic i love to shoot as well. Don't know whether you shot this in RAW but presume it would be an ideal candidate for RAW. (water, highlights on stone and very light sky, although not yet 255 value sky yet). I have ruined many good shots of darkish scenes (lots of trees and so on) because there was some light sky peeking through that came out as 255 value. Hmmm, i believe we discussed this on a thread some time ago abt graduated nd filters, which i haven't purchased yet. What RAW help overcoming such problems or would a grad. nd filter still be called for? Anyway, i never have a better idea for what scenes it would be definitely worthwhile to shoot in RAW. For other type of shoots i may stay in superfine in order to save a lot of processing time. Does this sound about right?

Secondly, would a grad ND filter actually help with this particular shot since the light sky covers only a small corner of the image???
Replying to my questions here on your pic would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Anyway, nice shot. You might try to darken upper, uppermost greens with hue/sat. Alternatively, you might consider cropping off just about the top of the rocks. It would make for a stronger, more serene image.

Watkins07.jpg
by kirbic

Comment by pitsaman:
Beautiful photo,nice leading line,this one is the best!

Memory.jpg
by kirbic

Comment by GeneralE:

Originally posted by shadow: this is very nice. the two solder makes it look like eyes :)

Yes, try flipping it over.

Memory.jpg
by kirbic

Comment by shadow:
this is very nice. the two solder makes it look like eyes :)

Primarily Peppers
by kirbic

Comment by dsidwell:
I'm still envying the knife! Nice finish!

Primarily Peppers
by kirbic

Comment by kirbic:

Originally posted by eloise: After further looking, the peppers are made of wax, aren't they?

Nope, they are real. For all those who asked, the blue pepper is a common green bell pepper, color obtained thru hue adjustment. Note the bits of blue on the green stem of the yellow pepper. Just a bit too close in hue to differentiate from the green one.
In fact, this shot really gave me heartburn. I could not find a really deep green bell pepper, and so was forced to use the coolest light source possible, e.g. flash. This allowed me to differentiate between the green pepper and the yellow.
Since on-camera flash gave really poor results, I used a remote flash. But, lacking ability to synchronize the flash to the camera, I had to darken the room completely and use a 1/2second exposure, manually triggering the flash with my left hand just after triggering the remote release for the shutter with my right. I finished this thang at 04:00 AM, and I'm very happy about the 4th place showing (ohhh, so close!). I'm also very happy with all the constructive comments, 31 in all during the challenge. Thank you all.

Fritz

Primarily Peppers
by kirbic

Comment by eloise:
After further looking, the peppers are made of wax, aren't they?

Primarily Peppers
by kirbic

Comment by Anachronite:
a blue pepper? did you change the color?