Winner Announcement: "Conceptual Photography" Challenge

First of all I'd like to thank each of the entrants for taking time out of their busy schedules and submitting and entry - and not just any old entry!

I must say we received some brilliantly creative entries for this challenge. You should all be very proud of yourselves for coming up with such interesting, well thought-out and of course nicely captured images.

Given the strong field of entries, choosing a winner was very difficult task. However - for me - one particular entry stood out above the rest and really nailed the theme down perfectly.

It is with great pleasure that I announce the winning entry belongs to AxeMan (Rick) and his "Do What You're Told or Else" entry.




You'll see how driving while at the same time drinking beer and texting (with the police car's flashing lights in the rear view mirror) will quickly lead to the "or else" component of the image - the graveyard! Very nicely done Rick!

How about giving everyone a bit of insight into how you put this image together and what inspired you to come up with this particular concept.

Please join me everyone in congratulating AxeMan his winning entry!

THE CONCEPT:
When faced with this Challenge I wanted to do something that would deliver a message and would have high impact at the same time. With the Challenge falling on Memorial Day weekend I came up with Drinking and Driving. We've all seen the campaigns in ads and on TV this time of year. The three things your going to get ticketed for while driving outside of speeding is, drinking, texting, and no seatbelt. (I could not portray it in the photo but I'm not wearing a seat belt)

THE SET UP:
This was really the easy part of the shot once I knew that setting up my tripod in the back seat with my Sigma 17-55 2.8 lens was going to be wide enough to capture the entire view outside of the windshield and the interior of the car.

Next it was off to the cemetery to an intersection were all I had to do is move the car forward and back at the intersection to "adjust" the view outside of the windshield up or down. I set my camera on three shot bracketing +1.0 / -1.0 and went into the menu and set the camera so it would take all three shot just by pushing the shutter on my cable remote once after the self timer went off. This would be done with my left hand and give me enough time to pick my phone up off the dash and finish my pose for the shot. I thought about using the inferred remote but I would have to turn around to do this and was afraid it would throw my pose off too much (Not to boast, but this was done in one shot)

POST PROCESSING:
I chose to do this in HDR using Photomatix in "Fusion" mode. This way I could use all three images to balance the lighting between the inside of the car and the outside of the car with out having to Photoshop the entire windshield view into the photo. The speedometer and tachometer were Photoshop to show that the car is at speed (copy, cut, paste, and clone). The cell phone was isolated in Lightroom and the contrast and brightness were adjusted so you could see it better. The hardest part of this shot was the Police car. None of my "locals" that I talked to offered to help. So I download a photo off the web Photoshopped it in and isolated it in Lightroom and adjusted the white balance to match the rest of the photo.

TITLE AND FINAL THOUGHTS
I was talking out loud to my wife about the title "How many times must you be told" My 12year old stepson loves to watch me work on photos and he was listening to us talk and he said why not call it "Do what your told or else" evidently my concept had a impact on him to say something out of the blue like that so I stuck with it.

Excellent Rick, very creative!!

Congrats! Nice job that was well thought out.

Outstanding explanation Rick! Very impressive process and final result! Thank you so much.

Clever. Good winner, congratulations


Patrick
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

Congratulations! Great shot.

Rick, I think I enjoyed reading you description of the process of the photo, as much as I did the photo, this was definitely my pic for winner, but all the entries are great! Well Done!

Nicely done, Rick. Great concept and execution. A well deserved win.

I guess we all got that message!! Great. Well done

Congrats Rick,

Great shot, great concept and execution. Keep them coming!