Oh my goodness. Okay, so most of the time when we ask our students to submit images, we look forward to seeing the pictures they’ve taken. And usually, we narrow down the 100 submissions to a top 15 and have trouble narrowing down from there, but we always manage to call in the bad guy and make the harsh cuts. This is how we narrow down our images. At the February 23 workshop, I saw the backs of many students camera, and I thought “man, these people better submit their images.” Little did I know that I was only seeing about a fourth of the decent images. This class of students submitted over 400 images I had to narrow down. I was SO amazed! Okay, you think i’m making this up, but we managed to narrow down the 400 to 60 fairly easily. From those sixty though? Mike has to choose one? It took a long time, but I assure you it’s been the hardest contest we’ve had so far. .jpg)
So you want to know why? Jessica submitted a number of images. But that’s not what won her the free workshop. Of the ones she submitted she was extremely consistent. She captured unique angles, did a wonderful job with the exposure controls, but look at this moment between our models Leah and Jaiden!
At the bottom of this post is a gallery of the other top 25 images. I want you all to see how wonderful you all did. You were nailing exposures, getting tact sharp focusing, AND moving around to get unique angles. But first the runners-up:
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Audra: INCREDIBLE moment captured. Look at the movement frozen in time! The image is sharp, the exposure is correct! The two things that we think would make this image out of this world: leave a little more space on the right hand side of the frame, Leah’s a little tightly framed, it’s always a decent idea to leave a little wiggle room for cropping. Also, in a perfect world, we’d love to see a little more depth of field happening for the forest behind her (nothing a little post editing can’t fix).
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Christi: How I love this image too! I love the look Jaiden is giving Leah, and that Leah is the one “highlighted” it pulls you into the photograph, pulling you into the emotion happening between the two. Your composition is nice, Mike and I agree though, it’d ‘pop’ more if you cropped out the dead space on the right hand side. Also, when looking at the metadata, your shutter speed was a little slow, and when you zoom in, Leah’s face is a little soft, but gosh this is a great image!
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Krisha: You captured beautiful moment with spot on exposure! The framing is really good, we just recommend a little more room for Leah to breath in the frame.
Here’s the slideshow of the top 20 images! Congratulations guys, you all really delivered during this workshop! Hope you come to more because you guys all have a GREAT start!
