Fortnightly Challenge 9th Oct to midnight 23rd Oct - Street Photography
 

This fortnight's challenge - Street Photography - Any subject matter you like as long as it can be called Street Photography.

Fortnightly Challenge is open to all members of WPF. The challenge will be run on (GMT) time.

Post your photo in this thread any time from 9th Oct to midnight 23rd Oct.

Then a 3 day poll will be placed in this thread for voting on the photo you like best in this challenge.

Please give your photo a title.

The winner picks a challenge for the following fortnight and starts a new thread... in case of a draw the majority of members are happy with the 1st entry to start up the new challenge, which saves us having to do another vote.

1. One photo per member
2. To be taken during period stated above
3. The photo must include exif data with date and time
4. Post your entry as one attachment directly in this thread
5. No discussion of entries in the thread
6. Do not post any entries in the gallery until after the voting has finished

To create a poll :
* go to top of thread and in Thread Tools press 'Add a poll to this thread'.
[note: only the starter of this thread can see this option.]
* In the update options box change the number 2 to how many have entered.
* In each box put the title of the entered photos.
* In close poll, put 3 days.
* Submit new poll.

I find this really hard, however, happy to participate. It will be a huge challenge for me. What about everyone else? I will really enjoy the challenge but my early ideas is weather dependant

Me too ;) that's partly why I picked it - to push myself!

Street Photography
 

To me the term Street Photography conjures up photographs like this one; my mother photographed circa 1945.

I shall have to develop a different image!

Like your example of street photography Tangata,reminds me of the photographs taken by Vivian Maier.

Love the example Tangata

I once had a friend dress as a 'lady of the night' for me and took a gritty, atmospheric image of her leaning into a car, its headlights on, obviously 'picking her up'. I loved it. Will dig it out for you

Just A Street
 

Just A Street

You have made an ordinary street look so interesting.

After Dark
 

Wet Sunday evening, couple walking home from the railway station

Waiting for the Big Time
 

Playing some fabulous tunes

Altercation at the bus station.
 

Attachment 8305
Altercation at the bus station.

Not sure Im gonna get an entry in this time....see what happens tonight though.

Main Street
 

Well known location.:)

Just 11½ hours left to get your entries in ;)

I have one...whoop

My entry this time is:

The Bike

Congratulations on a very worthy winner John. Look forward to the next challenge.

thanks guys for the votes on my shot, much appreciated.
John

well done John, a brilliant shot of our High Street.

Thanks annieh

Well done to John for this weeks win. A lovely image and well deserved. My uppy and downy comments:

Uppy - Peter Waites 'Well Known Location' - I liked the composition and the leading lines of the houses to the right. The shine from the rain worked well too, however it's a shame about the lack of interest in the sky but these things happen. We can't always have a perfect sky. I would have liked to have seen this as a monochrome, would have worked wellwith the cobbles. Where is it BTW???

Downy - As mine was last, my downy is the 1st image. John's 'Just A Street'. I liked this from the start. Hehas made an ordinary street look extraordinary. I like the composition and the processing. It had foreground and background interest. Well done.

Mine - was a scrappy effort this week, had no motivation and dragged myself out in the rain at the last minute for this one. Apologies, however thanks for the one vote.

Mmm risky business this street stuff - I gave up on including people after one dodgy moment in Otley, Madoldie's altercation is just a bit too noisy to get the viewer involved I think but it was a brave attempt.
Digi's bike was a good shot but yeah maybe a bit short on "oomph".
Mine was shot in Haworth Digi - well worth a visit- and you're spot on about the sky. Wish I'd taken my tripod and set up a coupla shots.

Peter, sometimes we have to make the best of what we have! My mirror tells me this every day!

Has everyone one their ups and downs?

My up - Robski's After Dark. I liked this image - its got an impressionist feel, but for me it was lacking something with a bit of clarity. It may have been worth trying trying a bit of fill in flash at, say -2 stops, to just create some features in the walking couple.

My down - Madoldie's Altercation. I struggled with this one a bit - the brightly lit doorway on the left dominates the image and other than that the rest is a bit indistinct to work out what it's supposed to be. Again some fill in flash might have helped.

That's definitely true... but I'd be interested to know how you are doing your black & white conversions. Looking at the image, you've got a great sky & some gorgeous old brickwork so I would have though it should be possible to create quite a punchy conversion.

If you'd like to post the full colour original, maybe I could make some suggestions?

Wil sort that over the weekend. Im stuck with photoshop cs3 no b&w specific programmes. Im still learning and scared of too much post processing. My image was a little flat i must say.

I use CS3 and although its been superseded 4 times its still a very capable program. While I have the Nik Silver Efex plugin, within photoshop there are a number of different B&W conversion methods that give great results :)

Heres the original, though I did shoot in RAW

Ok I've had a play & attached is the version that I've come up with.

To explain a bit how I've got there...

I'm not sure if you worked your B&W conversion from the image you posted or if you converted to greyscale direct from RAW, but my first thought looking at the image you posted was that a) it's very blue & b) its quite dark & lacking in contrast. So the first thing I did was open the jpg in camera raw & hit auto white balance to get rid of the blue cast. Then added a bit of recovery to get a bit more detail in the cloud, some fill to brighten the alleyway & added a bit of contrast & saturation - screen grab of my settings attached.

I then added a Black & White layer & tweaked the sliders until I was happy. With most shots involving sky thats going to mean reducing the blues & cyans to get a moody sky & balancing the other sliders accordingly. In this case lifting the reds lightened the wall but reducing the magentas put some texture in the brickwork.

This made the path in the alley very dark so I added a curves layer with a mask to lighten it up. I also added another curves layer with a group mask to just add a little light on the bike itself. (I also cloned out the bit of angle iron on the top of the wall as I thought it was distracting)

Hope that's helpful - let me know what you think

Wow Gidders, that's amazing. It shows how far I have got to go. I have very little understanding of layer masks and do struggle somewhat with photoshop. You did a good job.

Thanks. Most of my skills are self taught by messing about or from books.

Have a look at this thread http://www.worldphotographyforum.com...ead.php?t=1398 for some good text books