I threw this up on FaceBook and on twitter earlier. From twitter there was a request to actually do the blog entry I threatened, and on FaceBook I was asked if this was a montage of several photographs. So I thought I’d better do the blog entry.
The photograph is a single shot taken from a freak angle with a 50-500mm zoom lens which is sort of soft at the far end. I had wanted to see if I could get a really sweet shot of a kitesurfer jumping above the masts of the Jeannie Johnson when she was a bit further out but none of the gorgeously good looking dudes who are kind enough to pose for me on the water actually jumped in exactly the place I wanted them to jump. But when I was going through the 500 odd photographs I took yesterday, this was there.
I discovered that the ship was too far away to do anything much with – way out of the field of focus, plus the photograph was done in jpg because of the continuous shooting for the sports shots (argghh – no jokes about 1D Mk IIIs) so messing around with the black slider wasn’t going to help here either. There was a layer of salt on the front of the lens at this stage- this is the nature of the beast, and yes, it wrecks my head, and Francois was between the sun and me so I was always going to be exposing for a shadow rather than for detail on his face so I knew instinctively the photograph was going to be a black and white silhouette if I was lucky enough to get anything out of it.
The vaguely film effect grain comes not from a filter but from the black and white conversion artefacts. They seem to be more pronounced with the jpgs out of the 40D or else I am only noticing them more out of that camera – that being said, the compression on the 40D is greater than it was on a 350D in my experience as I got bigger jpgs out of the smaller camera than I do out of the 40D. If the 40D did more than 17 frames in a burst, I’d do them, in RAW but it doesn’t and I lose the ends of jumps as a result so I use jpg instead.
I probably put a brightness layer over this after the black and white conversion and there is probably a curve thrown in as well. After that, I’d have to go back to the psd and investigate. Time wise, the job took about 2 minutes, maximum. We are not talking about a lot of effort here.
What I really like about this photograph is the splash of water at the base of it being so comparatively sharp and clear.
EDIT: This got picked up by pixie for Tweet of the Day. My baby photo done good 
if you like the splash that much, why not name the shot like that. my first reaction after it being twittered actually was ’splashing!’(francois looks like a splash of a guy as well;)
congratz on your pic-of-the-day again.