LightningPaul

Last week they have been burning the Christmas trees on the beach of Zeebrugge. The city puts all the trees, which were used to decorate the area, on one place. Everybody (can) add(s) their Christmas tree to the heap. When it starts getting dark they lit them. People talk and watch the fire slowly spreading around.

The picture is taken when it was already pretty dark. Here a man throws his Christmas tree on the big fire. I think it is shot just at the right moment. This reminds me to the very famous image "Behind the Gare St. Lazare" from the work called "The Decisive Moment" of Henri Cartier-Bresson. In that image you see a dark man jumping over water just before he lands on the water surface.

I would like to ask any members or fans of the site Vazaar to vote for the new topic The Decisive Moment. This site has many great topics but some are pretty similar and I think that this new topic is pretty original. Many thanks in advance.



TECH-INFO: One NEF converted in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). Normally I hate its conversions because it destroys the beauty of the red and orange (skin) colors which are so delicate. I read on the internet that some other Nikon and Canon users also complain about it. If necessary I use Nikon View NX which is free and does a good job, though it is not so user friendly. For this image I used the D2X mode in ACR which is more or less doing a fine job here. Are you also have troubles with certain RAW convertors? Please let me know your story.

In Photoshop, I used the curve tool only for the part with the sky and the man. The gradient tool lets you easily draw a nice transition on the mask of the curve tool. With the selective color tool I set the blues a bit stronger. With the dodge tool I made the face and the body of the man stand out a little bit more. Finally I cropped it into a 5/4 ratio.

I captured this image when it was fairly dark. I really had to set my camera to ISO800. Also the aperture and shutterspeed where reaching the limits for this shot. In ACR I pushed the exposure another stop. The result is a big amount of noise which looks, in my opinion, great for the man and the sky but for the fire it was disturbing.
I loaded the image in Noise Ninja, removed the noise and used the redo brush to paint back the original noise of the sky and the man. So we get a 50% noise and 50% pretty clean image.