Thank you to everyone that participated in the "Specular Highlights" assignment. The guidelines for this assignment were to compose an image that contains specular highlights, taking care to properly expose the primary subject in the image. (Specular highlights occur when light is directly
reflected off smooth surfaces such as glass, chrome or water. The term specular means that light is perfectly reflected in a mirror-like way from the light source to the viewer.)
About half-way through the week when I was still trying to figure out what to photograph, I realized how difficult this topic might be. I appreciate all of you that made the effort to find an appropriate subject. One of the primary reasons for this assignment was to highlight one of the "exceptions" to the general rule that we should expose our digital images to "protect the highlights." As I noted in the assignment description, we should understand that specular highlights are typically too bright to bring within the exposure range of our sensor without significantly underexposing the rest of the image. Instead, we should let the specular highlights go to pure white (clip), while recognizing that they may be bright enough to affect our exposure meter, and thus require us to apply positive exposure compensation to correctly expose the primary subject.
Congratulations to Rick Pepin, whose
Crystal Christmas Ornament won the vote for
People's Choice and was selected as
Editor's Choice for Technical Merit.
Crystal Christmas Ornament People's Choice and
Editor's Choice for Technical MeritPhotographed by Rick Pepin
I did think this image could benefit a little from sharpening. I thought the little bit of sharpening I added in Photoshop (Smart Sharpen, radius 0.4, amount 100%) helped emphasize the dimensionality of the crystal.
Crystal Christmas Ornament People's Choice and
Editor's Choice for Technical MeritPhotographed by Rick Pepin, sharpened by Keith
Thank you to everyone that participated in the "Specular Highlights" assignment.
Viewers are encouraged to respond to this thread describing
why you like a particular image, or think it was particularly successful at meeting the guidelines of the assignment.
Keith