Tuesday, August 4, 2009

And the winner is…

The selection for best photo from the Northport Photo Walk was this photo by Joseph Nuzzo. The photo uses the very popular High Dynamic Range Technique — better know has HDR. With HDR, there is strong detail in the highlights and shadow, and often the colors are intensified. True HDR photographs are made by combining a series of pictures of the same subject, each exposed with different settings. To create the effect, Joe used Photomatrix Pro (http://www.hdrsoft.com/), software designed for HDR photography, and he used Lightroom 2.4 for finishing. While he often uses Photoshop CS4 for touching up his HDR work, he did not use it for this photo.

If you would like to find out more about how Joe achieves the HDR effect you can contact him through his website, shutterspeak.net. A good source for HDR tutorials can be found at http://tutorialblog.org/hdr-tutorials-roundup/ and the National Association of Photoshop Professionals also features some HDR tutorials for members.

As the participants in the Photo Walk already know, I did not make the choice for the winner myself — I chose five finalist and put it to a vote (most of the finalists voted for themselves, so their votes did not count). I am not usually reticent to make a choice, but I did have a problem with this contest. The photo I would have chosen as the winner was taken by a good friend, and to avoid possible bad feelings, I decided to let the walk participants cast their vote. The other four finalist photographs appear below.



3 comments:

  1. All you choices are fine, photography is very subjective, people see different thing in photo's.
    As far as the winner, that's a different story.
    Fun art work but is it a Photograph. More graphic art than photo. As is... it looks like line art rather than continuous tone. How far do we manipulate the image before it's not really a photograph? I'd like to see it without HDR. What does the real shot look like? J Campo

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  2. yes maybe seeing a before shot and the end result would be intersting to to see, is it possible you can get that of the winning photo. I.Perez

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  3. I'm no pro in photography but it is my passion. I shoot with whatever camera I can grab :)

    Today's graphic arts computer techonology is truly phenomenal. No offense, but I thought this was a Photo Walk where we appreciate, share and learn photographic skills, especially from the pros. Viewing the Photo Walks from other cities (check out NYC) and other countries, the shots were amazing -- photography at it's best and in it's simplest form! SDVA

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