That does indeed look fun and I will certainly try it. Many thanks.

Seriously humbled .

Glyn

Here is the place for any discussion about Fortnightly Competition #82 - Preparations.

As is traditional I will stop looking in here once the first entry has been submitted.

The competition will close at 6pm GMT on Wednesday 14th December.

Good luck,

Glyn

Inspired by the build up of pre-Christmas activity going on around me I have set the subject for this competition to "Preparations".

I do though want to keep this competition open to a broad interpretation so I am looking for an image that captures the preparation for any task or event from the very simple, like an alarm clock or making tea to mark the start of a day, to something more complex and/or unusual. This can of course cover the current seasonal activities.

I want to see something that captures an essence of anticipation and remember that your image is always enhanced with the choice of a good title.

If you want any inspiration try putting "Preparations" into Google images.

The usual rules apply. The image has to be taken with a Pentax camera or Samsung DSLR equivalent and be shot within the duration of this competition. Please include camera details and shooting time and date with your image.

The competition will close at 6pm GMT on Wednesday 14th December.

Good luck and I look forward with some anticipation to seeing your entries.

Glyn

Wow, that was a surprise. Many thanks to RPLSF for setting an interesting task, your excellent reviews and of course, the difficult, but well performed judging. With your well executed first attempt completed you are now definitely an expert .

Lots of thanks also for awarding my orchid stack first place. Congratulations to Judith, Sean & darkskies, with whom I share the podium, and everyone else for a great set of interpretations. I really liked darkskies' distorted building, creating art from photography, which is something I always have great difficulty achieving.

My thanks to everyone who entered for keeping this competition alive. I now have the difficult task of coming up with a new subject but will hopefully post something up shortly.

Glyn

Orchid Stack

I aspire to towards doing a minimum of post processing so for this competition I thought I would enter a focus stack.

To try and keep the size down I have made the original shots smaller, numbered them (front to back focus points) and tried to combine them together which was not a complete success because there were 5 of them :

[IMG]http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w20/GlynM/Competition%20Entries/Orchid%20Stack/Stack-input_1-4-smallcopy.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w20/GlynM/Competition%20Entries/Orchid%20Stack/Stack-input_5-smallcopy.jpg[/IMG]

The, non numbered, originals of these were then fed into CombineZp to process the focus stack with the following intermediate result:

[IMG]http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w20/GlynM/Competition%20Entries/Orchid%20Stack/PyramidDoStack-small.jpg[/IMG]

Then I did a little tweak with the colour saturation and hue to try and bring out the yellow tones of the original flowers. I also did a little adjustment of the levels to make the background blacker. The image was then reduced in size and sharpened a little and here is the result:

[IMG]http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w20/GlynM/Competition%20Entries/Orchid%20Stack/IMGP2322-27-C1s-small.jpg[/IMG]

Pentax K-5 with the Samsung equivalent of the DFA100 Macro
1/15sec, F8, ISO200 & -1 exposure comp.

All images shot on 26th November 2011.

Tinkering done with Lightroom3 & PSE10.

No cropping needed

Glyn

There are two pictures, one very recent, that fit this description in the current "All Things Two" weekly competition here and wonder if the poster of the picture in question accidentally put it in the main gallery and then subsequently moved it.

Of course now, if this supposition is correct, you should not post a comment under the image until after the competition has closed (Midnight GMT on Sunday) although you can post a comment in the the discussion thread for this competition here at anytime.

Glyn

Many thanks Darlene for another great competition subject, your excellent set of comments and judging.

Congratulations to RPLSF for a very worthy wining shot plus Alexfilipov, Judith and Geordie01 for being the runners up.

I really liked Judith's shot which I guess is partly because I am a recent grandparent .

It does seem to be a struggle to attract entries for this competition but I really enjoy the challenge of having to produce something within the time-scale so I am certainly keen that we should keep it going.

Well done everybody for another great set of well-crafted interpretations.

Glyn

I got a cheap one of these tents from ebay that sounds like it is about the same size.

It did not come with any instructions and taking it out of the bag it just sort of exploded into shape I could not then work out how to fold it up and get it back into its bag . Fortunately I found some useful instructions, with pictures, here.

Traditionally I think you need three lights, one each side and one for the top but I get away with just the two at the sides without much trouble.

I'm using a couple of small lights with 25w daylight low-engey fluorescent bulbs which seem to work quite well. They look like these ones here but it was a couple of years ago and I don't think I spent as much as being quoted now. They felt a little bit cheap, although so-far have given great service, and I suspect that much of the cost is for the bulbs.

The advantage with these bulbs is that they run quite cool and I have been known to fix a hankie over the front to make a pseudo soft-box. I certainly would not want to do that with a 400w halogen .

[IMG]http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w20/GlynM/Misc/P1000234-small.jpg[/IMG]

Glyn

Just to say I have made my choices and the results are in.

Many thanks to all of you that entered and for such a great set of very colourful interpretations.

Glyn

The simpler plugin Fxif, v0.4.4, which when compared to Exif Viewer only produces a summary, (rather like the exif display in the gallery here), is working fine in FF8 so can be used as a stop-gap.

Hopefully it won't be long before exif viewer gets updated.

I have been having similar problems with plugins in Thunderbird which was updated to version 8 at the same time. It seems that many of these plugins need to be re-versioned for the now rather regular major updates from Mozilla.

Glyn