State Fair WINNER.... well in my category, but I got a Blue Ribbon!

Alrighty, so... I had a wonderful surprise last night, I went to the Utah State Fair last night to see how my photo did in the photo contest. Lo and behold, it won first place in the Advanced Amateur class, Architectural category. I was really chuffed and.... well.... made a lot of noise, did a few high fives with my buddy Dave who was there for moral support, just in case etc... 

Since then I have spread the good word in several places and received lots of compliments and a few questions as to how I did it. Well here goes.

I chose a cloudy morning in February, with clouds that were moving quickly. (It helps to have that as I learned a year ago when I did my first version of this shot.) I set up my camera with my Sigma 10-20 ultra-wideangle lens on an L-Bracket in portrait orientation. I set the tripod IN the pond and almost in the waterfalls, basically reaching as far as I dared without falling into the water. Had to be careful the side was covered in ice. I centered and lined up the camera as best I possibly could, locking the ballhead in place. I then determined how far I wanted to rotate the head to compose the final shot. I determined that 5 shots would give me the best coverage. So I then figured the amount of rotation for each shot from center and commenced to shoot 3 bracketed exposures at each position. Once that was complete I carefully got both me and the camera/tripod back onto solid ground and left.

Once I was back at the computer I blended each bracketed trio in Photomatix obtaining the following shots.

At that point it was time to stitch those 5 shots into a panorama, I used plain old Photoshop Elements 7 for that. Once that was done I began to work on exposure, which included a layer that was just sky which allowed me to adjust the foreground and background separately. To make that look good I had to cut the edge around the buildings and horizon by hand. This took 3-4 tries and several hours to make look right. I was then able to produce this: Which I almost wish I had entered in the Panorama category as well.... sigh.....

From the above shot, after merging the layers and some sharpening and brightness/contrast adjustments, I used my B&W conversion program, to give my final product that you see here. Simple right? Not even! This whole process took me hours over several weeks. With a quick set of revisions right before I sent it to get printed. Hope you enjoyed the small glimpse into what I do with photos.