Thank you to everyone that participated in the "Lights" assignment. The guidelines for the assignment were to photograph lights arranged in a pleasing composition, eliminating as much dark "dead space" from the image as possible. Participants were reminded to control the exposure to prevent blowing out (over exposing) the bright lights in the scene.
As you can see in the
Santa's Train image below, it is often a challenge to eliminate "dead space" from a nighttime scene of lights. Sometimes different cropping can help, but more often we have to search for a different perspective (or different scene entirely).
Santas Train
Sissy did a good job cropping the image below; however there is still a little bit too much "dead space" for this to be a strong image.
Christmas Spirit in Wisconsin
Rick's
Hyperspace Christmas image is a very good example of using a "different perspective" or technique to fill the dead space. I'm guessing that Rick took quite a few images while experimenting with this technique, and then chose the most pleasing composition when reviewing the images on the computer. Nice job Rick! (Rick used a 1.3 second exposure and zoomed out during the exposure.)
Hyperspace Christmas!
Becky also effectively eliminated the dead space and composed a pleasing image in her
Tree Lights image below. She used a "star filter" for this image, and the resulting streaks of light emanating from the tree lights helped to fill in the dead space and enhance the composition. This is a colorful, well composed image that effectively evokes "Christmas," and I can imagine it making a very nice Christmas card.
tree lights
The winner of the
People's Choice award was
Ribbons of Light. (We need more voters!) All the lights on our tree were white, so in order to add color to my image I took a macro shot of the lights through a translucent ribbon on one of the gifts under the tree, and then cropped the image to eliminate the dead space around the ribbon.
Ribbons of Light
I've awarded
Editor's Choice for Artistic Merit to Rick's
Hyperspace Christmas image, and
Editor's Choice for Technical Merit to Becky's
Tree Lights image.
Thank you again to everyone that participated in this assignment.
