My car roof
Jun, 2015Views
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Zenith Award
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Outstanding Creativity
Superb Composition
Absolute Masterpiece
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Same photographer See allBehind The Lens
Behind The Lens
Location
This is looking towards where the sun had just set over the water from Fergusson Park, Tauranga, New Zealand. I was balancing my cellphone on the roof of my car as the first few photos I took had the right colours, but were quite blurry (I didn't know about shutter speed then, just that it was blurry). This one came out really nicely, so I showed it to our Photography teacher at school and asked her what I could do with it. She recommended ViewBug, and once I entered it and it won awards from viewers in the first two weeks, I just got really interested in photography. Then my dad upgraded his camera and gave me his Nikon D90 with the 18-200 lens on it, and now I've got the tools to do SO much more.The foreground often tricks people - it's not water, it's my car roof!Time
This is taken about half an hour after sunset. I only noticed it because I love this time of night for the colours in the late evening sky.Lighting
I really, truly just liked the light and the colours from this sunset. I had never thought of myself as a photographer until I saw other people's reaction to this shot. My father has done it for years, but it was only the lighting you see here that inspired me to take photos at all.Equipment
This is taken on my LG G3 cellphone! I was trying to see how good the phone's camera was and onyl when I showed it to our Photography teacher did I realise how highly other people thought of it.Inspiration
I was driving home from work one evening and noticed the light in the evening sky was really cool to look at. I went down to Fergusson Park which is about two minutes from where I live in Tauranga, New Zealand. I parked next to the playground and just stared at the sunset for a while before deciding to see how well the camera on my new phone could capture it.Editing
The only post-processing I did on this was smoothing out the sky. I had practically no experience using PhotoShop at the time, so I selected the sky using the Magic Wand tool and the SHIFT key, and just made the wand range really high (about 70 I think) so that it would select everything that wasn't black. Then I used the Reduce Noise filter on it a few times and that was it. I didn't know anything else! The colours were as you see them here.In my camera bag
I only have a Nikon D90 and a Nikon VR 18-200 lens permanently attached. I don't own any other gear to speak of except a variable (cross-polarising) filter, and a ND4 filter. I have also bought a cheap tripod for experimenting with long exposure shots.Feedback
Wait until at least ten minutes after the top of the sun has set. The colours only start appearing then, and once the colours start, just take heaps of photos. The only trigger to stop is when the last bit of purple has gone to black!
