AirWalk

fiuu

I want to share the process. here we go.

- planned to leave today. couldn't get my ass up and do it for some reason. so I stayed at home.
-I am on a phone. a lengthy type of a conversation, I go out to a balcony and pick weeds out of the flower pots to keep doing something.
-wind. thunder in the distance. don't really notice it all too well in the beginning, but when a particular flash of lightning strikes, I can do nothing else but run to get my camera.
-I drop it on the way. (grabbed the bag which is usually closed, this time it wasnt) inhuman scream in process. as it turns out, all was fine.
-while trying to get the longest exposure possible, I notice that the sensor is as clean as a place below my bed is. I go take this "Rocket Air" and clean it. I do it once more later. barely better.
-I remove a couple of flowers from the balcony, put a thick blanket on the top of the fence and pinpoint the camera. (no tripod in my possession)
-set the timer (10 secs), turned off the timer after a few missed lightnings and furious screams on my end, eventually remembered to turn off IS (makes photos blurry on long exposures), wiped rain drops off lenses, held cover for it with one of my old school books (and I thought they aint useful), held the buttom. for an hour.
-remembered to turn on RAW just before I took this photo. dumb luck.
-no more lightning strikes, just in case I took another 20 shots.
-transfer to my computer, open adobe bridge, delete 250 out of 300 taken, label 4
-save 10 different exposures of this photo. load it in photomatix, play a whole lot with settings, save two versions, one with "details enhancer", one with "tone compressor"
-save 16bit tiff files, load them in PS as layers, and play a whole lot with it there. the memory of it is blurry, so I can't really say what was I doing.. >.<
-decided on a look of the photo I wanted to go with, flattened image (saved psd before), copied layer, and spent 30-45minutes on cleaning dark dots. freaking sensor and dust..
-resized, added 40px black frame, saved, and now we are here

it took a bit of time. definitely worth it tho. and now I know why I couldn't go today. I had to make this photo.

as for the title.. there is a guy made of lightning freaking walking in the sky. beat that. he still seems to be connected with the place he came from tho, so he couldn't stay. probably has a nagging wife at home or something. with a leash in her hand. he gets half a second of vacations. I hope it was worth it.

no texture, imagine that! haha.

ya all better like the outcome. you might not see another submition from me in a while. or not. who knows. miss me enough and I will be back.

here is to hoping the color settings on my samsung monitor are at least somewhat decent.. this one relies heavily on colors and if they are screwed up, so is the photo.

download for bigger resolution. and FULL VIEW dammit!

have fun! \o/

EDIT: just in case anyone's interested. metadata:
F22
6 seconds
ISO 100
17mm