Coming back – What was I doing?

Some of you may be wondering what the heck have I been doing. Why has this guy stopped disturbing us with his weekly mails?
Reasons are as follows

• I entered into 2 competitions (I have already communicated about one to you). I had to do some preparation for those. I will tell you about these in a moment.

• I then had to prepare for my exhibition at Barron Arts Fest. That exhibition was held today (10th Oct 2009) and I will tell you what I sold.

• In between I also did couple of photo shoots, you can see them here
  
  • St James’ Street Fair and Carnival
  • Woodbridge River Watch Environmental Site
  
  

• After coming back from vacations in early September, I had around 1000 pics to process. And this is what took away most of my time. I have already posted the Eastern Point and Mystic Seaport pictures. I will post Cape Cod pictures soon, I promise.

Many people ask – What do I mean by processing the pictures? Aren’t my pictures digital? So isn’t it already processed and I have the JPEGs ready to share straight from the camera?
Well folks, contrary to common assumption, some of you may be surprised to learn that none of the pictures that you see in any good site or magazine is straight from the camera. Almost all pictures need some form of processing (called post processing) in an image editor (such as Photoshop, Photomatix etc) in order to make it appealing or “presentable”. Some of the adjustment photographers do in post processing are;

1. White Balance – To get the proper color temperature for the image i.e to either warm or cool an image
2. Tone – To adjust color tones
3. Exposure – some times when looking into the LCD of you camera, you may not notice if the image is under or over exposed a bit. Photographers need to correct these if there is any issue with the exposure
4. Vibrancy and Saturation – To remove the dullness in color.
5. Fill light – To highlight dark areas
6. Contrast – To adjust the contrast between various colors in the image
7. Sharpness – To soften or sharpen an image or part of it
8. Noise – To reduce or increase noise in an image

This is not a complete list of post processing adjustments, however these are some of the crucial adjustments. In order to gain as much control over each of these adjustments as possible, seasoned photographers generally shoot their images in RAW format. This helps them in having better control over all the above adjustments and more, during post processing.
Post processing is a very time consuming job. And it requires a lot of patience.
Now coming to my competitions
The first competition was held at the New Brunswick Library in collaboration with Alfa Art Gallery. Photographers were required to submit 3 of their best pictures which were shot in New Brunswick. I submitted 3 of mine, but I forgot to read the crucial condition – photographs must be taken in New Brunswick! And none of my 3 photographs were shot in New Brunswick!
However I was not the only one who made the mistake. The judges selected 2 of my photographs to be in top 3!! But at the last moment had to give me just honorary mention for those 2 photographs because I failed to meet that criteria.
These are the 2 pics which one the honorary mention (I got a certificate for these - cool!)
Honorary mention #1
 

Honorary mention #2


The second competition was held in the Woodbridge town hall. The theme was similar. We were asked to provide 3 photographs taken in Woodbridge. This time I did not make any mistakes. I submitted the best 3 pics I had of Woodbridge. The following picture won the 3rd prize in the competition!

This was taken in the Woodbridge farmer’s market!
Now coming to Barron Arts Fest Exhibition. Well, I have been preparing for this for almost 4 weeks. The exhibition was on 10 Oct 09 between 10 AM to 4PM. But on the day of the exhibition, we had slight drizzle until 12PM :-( which meant people did not turn up until 1PM.  Even then there were only a handful and many were just mid-day strollers! So a not so satisfying exhibition. I did manage to sell 5 photos and 2 calendars for about $120 , but I was not completely satisfied with the response to the exhibition itself.

BLOG UPDATE***: Pictures from Award Ceremony @ Alpha Art Gallery

Photographer & Copyright owner: Jim Roselli

Both my pictures on display @ Alpha Art Gallery

Suni and I listening to the Award presentation ceremony

One of my pictures being shown during the presentation ceremony (Presenter and coordinator: Ms. Kavita Pandey)

Receiving certificate for Award#1 :-)

Award #2 :-)

Signing the guest book.