Photoshopped

Received a mailing today from PhotoWorkshop.com (no relation) about their photography and Digital Imaging competition – the header image by Wendell Penedo (a former first prize winner in their Photo Illustration category) is a striking surrealist image of raining umbrellas. (I won’t reproduce the image here in respect of copyright.) Well I say umbrellas but it doesn’t take a moment to notice that it is the same cloned and flipped singular umbrella. Very lazy composite imaging as you have shadows and highlights in direct contradiction on the flipped umbrellas – something I would have criticised any undergraduate student of mine for. What I found surprising is that Wendell Pendeo’s other work in his short portfolio is exquisitely put together – so how did this win first prize and go unnoticed by the judges? Perhaps it’s a planet with two suns, perhaps people are forgetting to use a photographer’s eyes when producing photorealistic fantasy imagery.

New (old) ultra-wide

One of the joys of the Nikon D700 is having your wideangle lenses back – no more x1.5 cropping. The downside of course is losing any DX (digital) designed wide so I’ve reluctantly parcelled up the 12-24mm f/4 G AF-S DX (IF) Zoom-Nikkor and sent it back to its owner. Having also sold my 10.5mm f/2.8G AF DX Fisheye I needed something truly wide for the D700. The logical choice would be the new professional quality 14-24mm f/2.8 zoom but frankly it’s too heavy for my way of working (walking around all-day with a camera around my neck!). The 14mm introduced at the time of Nikon D1 seemed to fit the bill and I’ve now had a couple of outings with it – one to Gateshead as you can see. At one-third the weight of the 14-24mm zoom it’s at least useable – and addictive but as much a curate’s egg as any other attempt I’ve every had at extreme wide-angle, fisheye or otherwise. With 114° coverage it has to be the widest optic I’ve ever used and requires some serious compositional thought as everything can simply look flat and distant without your getting in close and finding some foreground.