Touching The Surface Of The Natural Mirror
 

by : sz1

I had the idea for this photo for some days. I already took photos from the same place some days earlier but photos did not come as good as I wanted. The weather was not the best either. (I made the first pictures from that place and boat already in mid-summer).

So I and my companion went to the river side in Saturday evening, 10th September. It was just a perfect calmness at the river, cool evening just before the sun was set. That was just a perfect situation! It was kind of unreal feeling there.

My goal was to have very dramatic perspective for this photo (as it was aimed for a challenge with the subject of perspective). So I took this photo holding camera very low over the surface. In deed, my hands were touching the water. I had to be careful not to sink my camera. I took several shots to make sure I would get the perfect one.

I used the focal length of 18 mm to make photo as wide I could. (I had to crop it a little though later to get rid of some unwanted objects.) I used manual settings for my Canon EOS 350D. They were f/7.1 for aperture, 1/80s for shutter and 400 for ISO. With those setting, I managed to get the bridge far away in focus but also get enough speed to be able to hold the camera steady. I would have wanted to use lower ISO but in those situations I needed to play safe.

Although I liked the picture as it was, I made these to make it even better (and I really like to post edit):

Little bit NeatImage (although, it was not really needed).
Little bit cropping for rule of third.
Contrast/Brightness.
Saturation.
Color balance.
Shadow/Midtone/Highlight.
Noise removing to make it even more smooth (just to remove some noise after contrast and color changes).
Little bit USM.
Frames.

For this winning version I also removed some objects (at the right). I darkened the blue sky and smoothed things even more.


 

source : www.photos-of-the-year.com