VOTING CLOSED for the August Photo Competition

[Simon Bolivar]

11

[Streetfighter]

11...

[PeeJay]

Less than half an hour to go

[Greg]

11

[PeeJay]

Congratulations to [MENTION=13449327]Tom Major[/MENTION] who won this by a country mile, 13/17 votes. This month had one of the highest number of entries but a disappointing number of votes, only four more than the entries. Come on guys, join in!
Anyway Tom sent me your name and address and I'll send you your price.
It is now up to you to host September's competition, the prize does not need to be extravagant.

[Tom Major]

Thank you for all votes gentlemen.

PM on the way .

[smokey joe]

Congratulations [MENTION=13449327]Tom Major[/MENTION] - in your excellent photo what is the thing with the ship on?

[SHAMZ84]

congratulation fella....would love to know how you took the photo.. loving how you got the golden colour out..been playing with my camera, just never know what settings to use to get such effects.

[Tom Major]

Thank you. I will respond as soon as I come back home from work....

[Tom Major]

Finally came back home .

Once again thank you all for votes. Was very surprised when I saw what was happening, and I rush to explain why .
@SHAMZ84

To get effect like that, camera settings only won't help much. To take this shot I've used

3 of those



* some world atlas, a very old book that saw better days. It was stored in damp shed for a while, kids spilled few drinks on it etc, thank god pages inside are still in good nick

* The four corners of the world tea tin, example here

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/RINGTONS-NOVELTY-TEA-TIN-CADDY-FOUR-CORNERS-OF-THE-WORLD-SILVER-EMBOSSED-/331950491677

- @smokey joe - it has different picture on every wall, there is ship, car, train and horse. There are photos in the listing linked above.

* few bands that I kept

* as a camera - Sony Xperia Miro. A budget phone, think now it can be bought for about 60-70 quid new.



* my Mrs' Iphone's flash.

What I did was simple enough. Pic was taken on the floor in dark room, backlit with night lamp (think it's about 7W). All I had to do was positioning of candles so I had nice, warm scene without any burnt or underlit areas. Then my Mrs used her flash through white paper to act as a reflector, only to sharpen details a bit without using flash of my phone. Fun bit was when it came to my phone's settings. This camera is s**t, let's face it. I had to find correct angle, so it could set exposure exactly as I wanted it to, cause in case of pointing and clicking pics were under or overexposed. When I did that, in manual mode I corrected exposure (+0.7EV), supported elbows on the floor and fired . Took me a while to make that one pic that I liked (just under two hours), but overall I was happy with effect, despite being a bit limited with framing.

Another concern was noise, but it didn't came out too bad and i kinda like it, think it adds little something to overall composition.

All scene or effect modes were turned off, pic was shot in full manual. Since I don't have DSLR anymore (Nikon with telephoto got broken....) all I had left was my little phone and its 5MPix camera. I'm so glad it worked!

Now I will be honoured to host next month's photo comp. Mind you, as I just started, I don't have any fancy, aged sticks, but will buy something suitable. Just please allow me few days, so I can think of the subject and look for the prize. I am looking forward to it, some pics here were amazing!

@PeeJay - could you just confirm if you have received my PM? When voting was closed I was at work, my dinner just finished and I had to go back. Leaders and management don't like mobile phones on site, so to avoid getting in s**t I had to hide in the toilet, but my time was very limited. In addition my phone froze, so not sure if you'd have two messages or none .

Regards
Tom

[Johnny Thunder]

You deserve the win for effort alone, never mind the result.

Superb.

[Tom Major]

Haha, thank you [MENTION=13372001]John[/MENTION]y Thunder

[PeeJay]

Got your message

[SHAMZ84]

Great effort tom you put some real thought into [emoji106] [emoji106]

Something I'll have to play around with when ever I get some spare time...didn't think about candles to create an effect...to be fair only recently started playing the camera and seeing what I can do with it.



Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

[Tom Major]

You can do much more than you think . I loved my Nikon before it got damaged and spent hours on learning, some stuff was very interesting. Can't wait to get another body, will be Nikon again, but still can't pick one model...