On Saturday I competed in my first Photography Competition, the Canberra Photomarathon. The idea of a photo marathon is that each competitor is given a number of themes to interpret, there is a strict time limit on the time available to take the photographs, and they must be in taken in the theme order, this is where the challenge gets really interesting and of course no photoshop the images must be entirely created through camera work.
Canberras Photomarathon was 12 themes in 12 hours, or there about, with the first 6 themes provided at the start of the day and the other 6 at lunch time, which had to be collected by a person. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience, I learnt a lot about thinking quick (albeit that I need to practice thinking quick, but that is still a lesson) as well as the importance of the setting up the photo at the time of shooting, do not rely on photoshop later.
Now to share my entries with you...
The first theme for the event was your entry number, mine was 34.
Embarrassingly I was stumped on this theme, but walking through the Canberra centre one of the butchers had steak out for $34. The only thing I would have loved to do with this is to adjust the colour balance, compensate for the purple light that the butcher had in the window.
The second theme was 'Can't live without', I took the health track with water.
This image was taken at the fountain near the Canberra Theatre, constructed with clever use of my Polarising filter (to remove the glare from the water), my 300mm lens and the smallest aperture I could. The small aperture allowed be to use an shutter speed of 1/2 a second (an eternity in photographic terms) and capture the movement of the water.
Third theme for the day, 'Evolution'. For this I headed to Parliament House where in the black marble of the lobby is shells and creatures from millions of years ago, fossilised in the marble. To contrast the past with present, the reflection is the entrance to the Great Hall.
Light was the forth theme, such a wide variety of directions to go with this, I settled on creating a path with string lights. After trying the plain fairy lights, I had a go with the flower lights, by keeping the lights on for only half of the exposure I managed to preserve some of the texture of the flowers.
'The Fifth Element', appropriate for the fifth theme. My entry followed the movie interpretation with the Fifth Element being love. These hand carved figures Jaime brought back from Germany and to us have always represented growing old together in love. We tried to create heart shaped hands together.
The final theme for the morning was 'Upside Down', where better to show this than children on a playground. Many thanks to all my nieces for playing upside down, it was hard to pick one photo.
I think that is enough for one post, I will put up the afternoons session soon.