Tag Archives: Competition

How I Took That Shot – Anthony O’Connor

Anthony O’Connor won our recent ‘Reflections‘ competition with his wonderful night shot of Ballycotton Bay.

reflections-3

Here’s how it came about:

“The image was taken from Silver Strand. I had this image in my mind for a while since I had seen a similar shot on the ECCG website in the 2009 calendar. The conditions were perfect on the night so I hung around for a while and took several shots at different settings”.

Camera:Canon 400D
Lens: 18-55mm Kit lens
Focal Length: 18mm
F5.6, shutter speed 13 secs, ISO 400.
Lens flare: I normally have a UV filter on the lens all the time but I took it off on the night. Also the moon was well up in the sky and well above the frame of the image so flare wasn’t really an issue. The clouds probably helped reduce the brightness of the moon also.

I later adjusted the contrast (-1), saturation (+1) and colour tone (-1).”

See more from Anthony here.

Like to get involved with ECCG? Click here.

How I Took That Shot – Fidelma Read

Fidelma Read tied for first place in our recent ‘Reflections‘ competition and eventually took second after a count-back of ‘possible scores’ was done. Her touching shot was all the more remarkable when she revealed that she had taken it with her iPhone!

reflections-2

“We were away for the weekend and my three-years-old daughter, Ryana, had her face painted a few hours previously so it was quite smudged at this stage. Back at the house, she wanted to go outside to see the ducks but it was raining. She put her face up to the window to look out at the rain, and I could just see the photo in front of me. As luck would have it, I had my iPhone in my hand so managed to capture the moment. Of course I was wishing I’d had my Canon in my hand at the time, but the phone didn’t do a bad job and the moment wasn’t lost.”

iPhone 4S
Eyes darkened a little in Lightroom.

Fidelma isn’t the only photographer who gives the DSLR a rest in favour of the iPhone. Click here for the story.

Like to get involved with ECCG? Click here.

How I took that shot – by Karen Fleming

The winner In our recent ‘Food’ competition was Karen Fleming with her homely coffee cup image. Here, in the second of our ‘How I took that shot’ series, Karen explains how she created this image (click to enlarge).

Winning image by Karen Fleming

“To come up with the food shot I thought to myself what is my favorite thing that I like to indulge myself with? The answer was simple enough – a nice cup of coffee accompanied by cake! Since Irish weather does not lend itself to alfresco lattes, I had to work indoors, and where is nicest place to enjoy such a treat besides out in warm sun? Curled up in front of a blazing fire!”

“This gave me a general idea for the shot set up. As I was using the theme of ‘homely / fire’, I wanted to portray the element of “home made” in my shot so I borrowed the coffee grinder and bean sack from a friend”.

“With all the elements at hand, I began to set up the shot. I put the coffee table in front of the fire in a dark room to cancel out all other ambient light and bring out the detail and colour in the firelight itself. One of the biggest challenges was to find a shutter speed that would be slow enough to bring the firelight into the shot and fast enough to hold some detail in the flames without them blurring totally. There was a lot of trial and error to get the right look”.

“I set the camera on a tripod and at ISO 100, I chose f22 to give me depth of field through the shot. I tried a few different shutter speeds to get a feel for where the fire was casting light onto the table and the objects on it. Looking at the results of these I could then see where I needed to start adding in extra light to my image”.

“To achieve this additional lighting, I put a flexible desk lamp on the left and a flash head on the right fitted with a snoot so as to concentrate the light from that side onto a specific area in the image. I only used the modeling light of the flash head and not the actual flash itself. This could have been achieved just as well with a second desk lamp, fitted with a home made cardboard cone for a snoot”.

“Now I had ambient light in the background from the fire and fill-in lighting coming from both sides, so all that was left now was to add some light from the front to highlight some of the details. For this I used my LED ring light, which attaches to the front of the lens. This is a continuous light source that can be switched from full ring to half ring, left or right as desired. They are designed for, and I use it mainly for, macro photography. They are available for about St£30 online”.

“All set up, I left my camera on f22 and tried different shutter speeds to see the effects I was getting. Too slow was bringing in too much light and too fast was not enough light. Two seconds gave me exactly what I wanted”.

Technical Details:
Canon 5d mk 1. Sigma 105mm macro lens.
ISO 100, f22 at 2 seconds.
Levels and Curves adjusted slightly.

See more of Karen’s images here.

Food Competition – Feb 2013

The group met at The Midleton Park Hotel on Tuesday 26th February 2013. It was the first competition night of the year with the theme being ‘Food’.

For the first time, judging was done on projected images rather than prints, and the competition drew 29 entries. As the images were previewed from start to finish before being judged individually, it was clear that the standard was very high and that the members had, indeed, been busy for the past few weeks capturing their entries.

All members present broke up into groups of 6 or 7 and critiqued each image in turn. Each member then awarded the individual images a maximum of 30 points by allocating up to 10 points each under the three categories of Creativity, Composition and Lighting. Once judging was finished, each member gave the back story to their competition image explaining the technique, lighting and post processing employed to create the image.

Following some serious number crunching the 1st, 2nd and 3rd places were established with third place going to Mervyn Daly, second place to Craig O’Brien and first place to Karen Fleming. These are the winning images (click to enlarge):

Winning image by Karen Fleming1st place: Karen Fleming

Craig O Brien

2nd place: Craig O’Brien

Mervyn Daly Food (2)3rd place: Mervyn Daly

Chairman, Tom Tattan, praised the high standard of the images, some of which were submitted by new members of the group, for whom this was their very first competition.

View all the competition entries in the slideshow below. Mouse over to see the photographers’ details  and to use the controls.

[slideshow_deploy id=’108′]

Click here to see more images from the group.