We’ve all been there before – there’s something you want to take a picture of, but it’s been taken a billion times by others (i.e., Grand Canyon) so how do you make it different? Of course, traditionalist would say do it “in-camera”, and that’s great. Go for it. However, in this case, I hadn’t really got anything unique in camera, so I started to play around in Photoshop to see if I could come up with something cool. For this shot, I used Nik Software Color Efex 3.0 Complete and tried various different filters to see what I could do to make this shot look better. I loved the subject, but it had honestly been a pretty bad capture as well – nothing very interesting. In the end, I decided to go with the solarization filter.
When I first saw what this shot looked liked after processing it I thought it was really cool, but I never thought I could do anything with it because it was so heavily processed. However, on a whim I decided to enter it into a photo contest (my first) for the local paper where this place is located. Lo and behold I became a photography contest winner! While cool, I dismissed this as a fluke as this small paper probably didn’t have a high bar. However, when I had my portfolio reviewed by a top pro he singled this out as one of his favorites, even though I hadn’t planned on using this photo! In the end, I learned that doing something different with this highly photographed subject, even if it is extreme like this, can be a great way to differentiate your work from the sea of others.
This photo was shot with a Canon Rebel XTi w/ BG-E3 BATTERY GRIP using a EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM lens zoomed out to 20mm at 1/125 sec at f/8 ISO 100.
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