CSX Nature is Beautiful Photo Contest

My little brother turned me onto a Facebook contest that the logistics company, CSX, was organizing; the theme of which was to represent nature in all its beauty. Naturally, I chose the photo below, a 3 shot HDR panorama I created while living in Mexico; the exact location is named Hierve El Agua, which is Spanish for boiling water. It’s a unique place in the world, only two of them exist. It’s so special because it’s a natural spring of water that is super saturated with calcium carbonate; so over thousands of years, as the water flows, rock will build up in the shape of the water flow.

After an initial round of selection from over 500 submitted photos, my image was selected among 49 others; voting was then opened to the public through Facebook, and after a full week of voting my image was voted as a winner! So, thank you, to all of those that voted and supported me; it really does mean a lot to me!

Forest Park Runner

For the last few weeks, I’ve been working on my submission for the Fstoppers 2011 Behind the Scenes Photo Contest; the idea is to put together a video showcasing the behind the scenes of a photoshoot. For my entry, I decided to focus on all the planning that goes into making a composite photograph of a person running across an old metal bridge found in Forest Park. I picked this particular scene because I wanted to create an image that had a good balance between the city and the park; the hope was then to submit the image to Runner’s World Magazine for publication. Hope you enjoy the photography and the videos, make sure you check them out in full HD glory!

 

I kept the first video a bit short so that it’d be watchable while still being packed full of useful information. I did skip over a lot of details so I also put together a more detailed look into the post-processing process including how to process the HDR image and how to put the composite together.