Scream

This shot was taken during Scott Kelby's Worldwide Photowalk in Detroit, Michigan. I don't normally take pictures of kids simply because people might get the wrong impression, however during the photowalk there were several of us taking pictures of kids in the fountain so it was less of a problem. This particular fountain is located along the Detroit Riverwalk, just behind the Renaissance Center (GM Headquarters). The day of our photowalk was quite warm and there were several kids playing in this fountain. This particular boy was running through the fountain yelling at the spouts of water as they shot up. As he was running through the fountain I took several shots and this one was the best of the bunch. I like the way the water is just coming up from the fountain as if his yelling was causing the water to shoot up.

The image to the left is the 'as shot' image. When I was working on the image I wanted to eliminate extra elements from the shot and focus on the boy and his relationship with the fountain. While I did some original work to adjust the color, I decided fairly quickly on that a black and white image would look the best. All processing was done using Lightroom 2.0, with minor finishing work in Photoshop CS3.

This shot was taken using an Olympus E-3 with the 70-300 Digital Zuiko lens. Focal length was 190mm with a crop factor of 2x. Exposure was 1/640 @ f/5.6 using ISO 100.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Image and text Copyright © 2008 James W. Howe - All rights reserved

Thanks!

Recently I had the pleasure of attending the Detroit edition of Scott Kelby's Worldwide Photowalk. Scott has written a new book on Lightroom 2.0 and as a way of celebrating its release he decided to arrange for 'photowalks' in numerous cities. Each photowalk was limited to 50 people, but some cities had more than one photowalk. The idea was so popular that there were photowalks in more than 237 cities world wide. As part of the event prizes were given out. The leader in each city picked a winner from their photowalk. That winner won a copy of Scott's new Lightroom 2.0 book. Each of these winners was then in the running for a grand prize. In addition to the grand prize, there were also 10 runners up who won a prize as well. Well, Scott announced the winners today on his blog and I'm honored to be one of the 10 runners up with my Renaissance Center image.

Given the high quality of the images that were submitted for the photowalk (search Flickr tags for 'scottkelbyphotowalk', or just search for "Scott Kelby's Worldwide Photowalk") it is quite an honor to be selected not only as best for the Detroit photowalk, but to be one of the 10 runners up. I'd like to thank Scott for having this event, and to Terry White for running the Detroit photowalk. I had a great time wandering around the Detroit riverfront area taking pictures with a bunch of other photographers. I hope this becomes an annual affair (prize or no prize.)

Thanks!