The Making of "Stone Chairs"

How the winning image of our September, 2017 "Repeating Patterns" photo contest was made

By mymage in Photo Contests on Oct 27, 2016

Hi to all Pentaxians and a special thanks to those of you who voted for my photo. I was nicely surprised to find that the photo I proposed got all this attention since it is a bit "flat"!

"Stone Chairs"

Anyway, a long long time ago, just after the battle of Dantooine, there was a time in which I took photos especially during the week ends, walking around the city searching for something interesting. My camera was a Pentax K-7 with an smc Pentax-FA 80-320mm F4.5-5.6 lens. I arrived around 10:30 AM at a place prepared for a night projection of a film, it was summer and a sunny day. The black seats were just positioned so they were nicely lined up and cleaned:

I began walking around, searching for a good perspective or some nice play of shadows, plastic and metal. I shot about ten images, paying attention to not burn the white reflex and trying to increase the DOF using a small aperture (the shutter speed wasn't a problem with a full sun). Here are two of the images which I discarded:

During the shoot I visualize the final effect, I wanted a bit more contrast with the deep black that I like.

A that time I did not have a good method to organize the images, so I reduced the original to 3000px max length and did not save the original after post production (I know, the dark side was strong in me).

I don't normally use an elaborate post processing process. Just level, contrast, and a bit of saturation. In this case I probably only used the level regulation. No saturation touch-up was required because the subject was "naturally" in B&W (click the screen shot to enlarge):

Someone noted that the definition in upper left corner isn't good: the problem is that I was near the first row of seats and therefore relatively distant from the last row. Add to that a less than perfect lens and perhaps focus was off too.

What I like in the final image is that can be taken for something else, or give a sense of different perspective (in a comment someone thought that the view was from the back, but it is from the front of the seats).

So that's all folks. I hope this simple image will invite you to go out and search for something strange to shoot!

Have nice light, as we say in Italy.

Ciao!

- mymage