We are very pleased to announce that the winning picture of our Q3/2016 competition on “Inspirational Landscape” is the photo by Janick Millasson.
The jury had a headache choice as 18 photos capturing the essence of the competition theme were submitted. Most of photos offered a nice journey to distant geographies so that the jury members could feel a bit the holiday mood. Each of the members selected their top photographs evaluating the composition, creativity, technical quality and as a result the simplicity of the shot, linearity and rhythm of Janick’s picture grasped the jury’s attention.
So, congratulations to Janick who will receive a Rosco Strobist filter Kit of 55 filters.
“I took this shot on a road trip to Sweden. On the 2nd day of the trip we crossed Denmark from west to east – the bridge in the picture is the Storebaelt Bridge, a huge monument of transportation architecture consisting of two parts, both measuring about 6.6 to 6.8 kilometers in length. I was aware of the bridge lying ahead of us but only when we approached it I saw how gigantic it actually is. I felt like this was worth at least a short stop even though the weather wasn’t particularly good and I wasn’t expecting to take any shots that I’d be pleased with. Still, I strolled around the head of the western part of the bridge, looking for a good spot to take a cpl shots. Playing around with a UWA lens I quickly noted that the bridge was so long that I actually needed a tele lens for what I was after (the shot was actually taken at 200mm on a full frame body).
After a while I had found my spot and mounted my D810 with the 70-200 2.8 on a tripod. The slightly troublesome part about this shot was that I had no ND filter for my tele and standard zooms at the time – only a set of square ND’s for the filter holder of the 14-24 UWA lens. So I improvised, took the 150*150 1.8ND filter and held it in front of the lens while exposing. I hadn’t had that much experience with filters back then and nothing at hand to calculate the exposure (phone was back in the car). So it was down to guesswork and trial / error mode. The exposure is 25s at f/8 and ISO 64 and sadly it is quite a tad underexposed, so I had to bump the lights and whites in post which is where the noise and tonal loss in the sky originate from. Lesson learned: For land- and cityscapes I will check my histogram after every change in exposure instead of just having a quick look at the shot on the camera display.
Nonetheless, in the end I’m quite happy with the shot, there’s a color version of it, too, and I’m still not sure which one I like better.
Oh and by the way: I definitely need to learn how to bring up lights / whites in post without introducing noise and loose tonal values… if anyone has a good hint on that I’d be glad to hear so (my parents want this printed very large and hang it at their home – I refused to print as long as the noise / tonal value loss problem isn’t solved).”
(Janick Millasson)
To see other pictures” pictures submitted to this competition please visit our media gallery.
