I recently entered the Duke Art's Festival that was held for 2 weeks in the Bryan Center. I entered three pictures and was recently made aware that I had won an award. I received honorable mention in the category of best in show and even received a small monetary award! Wow, ya crazy. This picture will be hung for the rest of the school year in either the Bryan Center or the Allen building on campus (they haven't told me yet). Let me make something clear, this is amateur photography! Anyone could have taken this picture. I have learned that photography is more about being at the right place at the right time. Great Photographers, I think, just know when to be there and do it consistently.
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This picture was taken in Santa Monica, California in December of 2009. I was out on a trip visiting some friends from college and had finally gotten someone to take me over to the famous Santa Monica pier. My friend Nick and I headed out a little after breakfast so he could go surfing for a while and then we made our way up to the pier. California, at least this area has done something amazing, they have created biking trails that go up and down the entire beach. We decided to rent bikes and rode all the way down to Venice beach. It was really only like 2 miles. This was probably the most relaxing day of my entire trip. I took a number of other pictures that day of the Sunset, but they were fairly generic and were more touristy pictures than anything. This was my first time visiting California.
As we were riding back we were quickly realizing that we were running out of time. If we didn't make it back we were going to have to be late to return the rented bikes and get charged for another whole day. We went over this small bridge while riding bikes, I looked to my left and was completely stunned. California had captured my attention. I am not really what this little waterway is from, I imagined some time of water runoff, but since it doesn't rain much, I really don't know. Either way, it was kind of amazing, as you can tell and even though we were running late, I decided to stop. I want to point out that Nick who actually had a nice camera at the time and is fairly artistic did not stop. I took my Canon 870IS, which was dangling around my wrist and took a few different pictures at different exposures. I had never heard of shutter speed, aperture, or single lens reflex. My camera was a fairly decent handheld, but alas was still a point and shoot. I point this out because a few of my friends have been asking me about what kind of camera that I use.
The only modification I did to this picture was raise the saturation, removed some of the highlights, and raised contrast. I then sent it over to Adobe Photoshop and turned it into black and white. Some how in between last December and now I lost the original copy but had this one saved online. It isn't the highest quality as you can see in the degradation around the blacks, but apparently the artist who visited Duke to judge, liked what "effect
I now have a Canon T1i, which I am in love with and I don't think I will ever be able to go back to a point and shoot for anything other than, well actually nothing. I am saying that you should really get out there and try to see what you can do with your point and shoot before you take the plunge into multiple lens, filters, and more information than you really needed to know. With a little bit of luck you might find something like I did. Just be at the right place at the right time.
