The Photographic Art Society of Florida. “Black & White and One Color” Exhibition.
I just got word that a print of my image “Girl with Yellow Pants Running” won First Place at the The Photographic Art Society of Florida exhibition last night. The theme of the show was “Black & White and One Color”. I took this image while on the second Ultimate Travel Photography Workshop (UTPW-II) earlier this spring while returning by bus from a field trip to the Pacaya Volcano in Guatemala (02-May-2011) in the town of San Francisco de Sales. The image was processed with Capture One Pro 6 using the inverse color selection tool to select the yellow color of the pants and notebook and decreasing the saturation of all other colors to black and white. Other processing was performed with Nik Viveza, Nik Define, and Photoshop CS5. I thank my sister Kari Sheppard for persevering while printing the image for the exhibition since it kept coming out too dark.
I got up early this morning to drive to the High Point monument in northern New Jersey. It was raining when I left, but I hoped that it would clear up by the time I got there. Just the opposite — heavy rain when I got there. Furthermore, the front gate was still locked. I gave up and drove back the long route along the Delaware River. Because of the rain there was very little traffic. I’ve used up most of my vacation this year between the Patagonia workshop with Thom Hogan and the Central America & Panama Canal Enrichment Voyage – Ultimate Travel Photography Workshop II with Michael Mariant. As such, I know that I am not going to be able to do a cross-country road trip this year so it was good to get a long drive in this holiday weekend.
When I got home there was a lull in the rain and I saw that the wild raspberries were starting to ripen. In order to get an image of a cluster of the berries in focus with everything else out of focus I took a series of images using a focus rail to adjust the camera to subject distance over a 3 cm distance with a macro lens. I then used Helicon Focus to make a composite image from the 20 images. The first image is the result. The next three images are the first (front focus), mid (middle focus), and last (back focus) images. Even though there was some (not much) movement due to wind, Helicon Focus did a great job adjusting the images so all of the composite images were correctly registered.
Today, I am posting some images of white-tailed deer in my backyard. The images were processed with Capture One Pro to get the single color and black & white effect.