This week, the 52-week photo challenge asks us to share our take on high key or low key images. Often this category gives us an excuse to share under- or over-exposed images. The image above was captured in mid-day at Yelapa, Mexico. In post-processing, I reduced the exposure setting and converted it to black-and-white. That low key conversion gave the impression that it was captured at night by moonlight. 

Increasing the exposure in post allows for a more artistic impression. This image was captured in Puget Sound. Raising the exposure level until only the darker shadows are visible lends a moodiness to the image.

My final entry is this low key image of Universal Studios during a fireworks display. It’s one of my earliest digital images and one of my favorites. That’s all that I have for challenge images this week. I still miss reviewing the submissions of the now-defunct Weekly Photo Challenge, but I still enjoy following my colleagues and their journeys in any case.

John Steiner

This week, we are challenged to look for contrasts in the photos we compose. In my opening image, a well-dressed individual walks along a dirt-paved alleyway in a small town in Mexico. 

One of the things I enjoy most about Boston is the age of the city. Unlike most of the places I visited in my life, mostly mid-west and western states, Boston is a very old city. In the photo above, one of the many cemeteries that were filled to capacity in the 17th and 18th centuries lie well-kept and respected next to buildings of a much more modern era.

The western states have seen a severe water shortage due to drought conditions in recent years. There is no more visible proof of the scarcity of water than in this photo of a river in New Mexico.  The docks were built for a time when the river was a major recreational area. This photo is four years old. I’d love to see the view today. I believe things have improved, but don’t know for sure.

Moving to a different location in New Mexico, the high plains near Socorro feature a 27-dish radio telescope array known simply as the Very Large Array. Such a clever and creative name from this group of scientists who designed and built one of the largest radio telescopes in the world. The dish field is much larger than the image would make it appear. Each of the dishes are on tracks and can be repositioned as needed by the masters of the giant telescope.

Aviation is changing. These two chairs are for the pilot and co-pilot of a large research drone. Tucked into a metal portable storage unit firmly fastened to the ground and sprouting electrical, computer, air conditioning, and photography monitoring gear, there’s room for a cowboy hat, more room than would be in an actual aircraft cockpit.

This last image is just for my own enjoyment. The stark contrast between the water and land is made less noticeable by the heavy overcast skies. The photo was captured from the deck of a cruise ship sailing in Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska.

John Steiner

As promised in the last of the WordPress Photo Challenge posts I submitted, I am back with a new photo challenge. If one searches the Internet for photo challenges, it seems there are plenty to choose from. There are Daily, Weekly, Monthly and more challenges. I settled on PetaPixel’s 52 Week Photo Challenge. The topics are changed every Monday and the entire year’s collection is available right now. You can find out more about this challenge here. 

Each week, the challenge is focused upon one of five different categories: Vision, Composition, Technical, Creative, and Wild Card. The ‘No Peeking’ refers to treating the camera like a film camera. In other words, compose your image in the viewfinder and ignore the digital display on the back of that fancy digital SLR or Mirrorless camera. I admit to getting lazy about composition. It’s easy to gather more information around the edges and to use post processing to crop and position the final image on the computer. The images featured in this week’s post were composed in-camera with the final image uncropped. In the opening shot, after a surprise snowfall, Bryce Canyon’s famous HooDoos are covered by a fresh layer of snow, the first snowfall of the season in late October.

One of my earliest photo challenge entries back in 2013 featured a different angle shot of this bench. That challenge post involved sharing images captured during the “Golden Hour”, that time of low sun either morning or afternoon. In 2013, getting used to the camera and being quite unfamiliar with photo processing software, I relied on composition in-camera. Learning how to post-process was detrimental in some respects to developing that vision of the final image as it’s too easy to experiment with composition and placement using those modern computer image-processing tools.

Finally, the last image composed in-camera is a small bar on the cruise ship Norwegian Pearl. It was after hours for this bar and something about the lighting along the bar edge attracted my attention. In most browsers, you can click on an image to enlarge it for better viewing. I am looking forward to following the new challenge which is designed more for going out and shooting rather than sharing images that have already been taken. I’ll probably be doing more shooting for this challenge than I did for the WordPress version.

We’ll see you a little further on down the blog.

John Steiner