This year, I decided to enter the annual Projected Image competition held by the Digital Imaging Group of the RPS; there were two categories, ‘Open’ and ‘Creative’.  As usual the standard was very high with 159 entrants submitting 463 images in the ‘Open’ category and 312 images in the ‘Creative’ category.

You can download a slideshow of the accepted images here from 2012.  I’ll update this link when the results and judging panel from this year’s competition are published.

These were my ‘Creative‘ submissions (click on them to enlarge); they were placed 249th, 249th and 187th out of 312, I guess they didn’t like them much!

These three entries were my submission for the ‘Open‘ category, these were placed somewhat better at 9th, 200th and 200th out of 463.  I am extremely pleased with my 9th place for ‘Dormant Passion‘.

I particularly like ‘Secluded Cafe‘ as this prints well on a large mounted print.  I enjoyed taking this shot in Florence with a small adjustment of chair placement and ‘waiting for the moment’ for the cyclist to pass.  A lot came together at the right time for me in the devleopment of this work.  I hoped Secluded Cafe would do better than it did, but I was up against all levels of photographer including pro’s and Fellows of the RPS!

Dormant Passion was an interesting experiment to see how far I could push the idea of simplicity; here is the basic shot out of the camera before post-processing the RAW image.  Taken with my Canon 5d Mk2 with EF24-105 f/4L IS USM lens; focal length 105mm, ISO 200, 1/100sec at f/7.1.  I knew what I wanted out of this shot when I took it, the focal length was set as long as the lens would allow.  I didn’t have a polarizer with me and was lucky not to have glare through the glass window; the polarizer would have thrown away too much light anyway.  Cropping the image tight on slightly more than half the face was critical. I enhanced the red lips somewhat and converted the remainder to monochrome to enhance the tonal quality of the face by removing the colour information.  It still lacked something so I added a suble texture.