In September, the Harrisburg Camera Club members were given six themes to vote upon for the last Digital Image Competition of 2012. The themes were: Abandoned, Decay/Decaying, Rainfall, Reflections, Square Aspect Ratio, and Wheels. The winner was Reflections.

Between the announcement of the winning theme, the Route 581 art exhibit and a trip I made to Concrete City in Nanticoke, I came up with an idea for my reflection photo. Unfortunately, due to the run of cold weather and basic scheduling conflicts I was not able to make that image. However, the idea still remains. What follows will serve as a “proof of concept” for my future collaborators namely, Phil, Jessie, Troy and Megan. Future collaborators please note: I will require your complete cooperation this Spring when the weather is a bit more conducive.

Cold weather and scheduling issues aside I quickly came up with an alternative idea that I am presenting here. In the spirit of “Full Disclosure” and if I may quote Michael “Nick” Nichols, Editor-At-Large for photography at National Geographic,

One must be willing to declare the process of making their images; it is an act of essential self-awareness.

Reflections Disclosure

My alternate idea centered around including my dark clad mysterious Bowler Man persona within the context of the reflections theme. Rather than using a reflective surface that one could easily find like a puddle, a shiny car or a building storefront I decided to use a mirror. I put the mirror in a location that normally does not contain a surface that would create a reflection. The images below are my “Disclosure”.

Mossy Trail Reflection

Over the past two Saturday’s I captured images first in my backyard and then at an elevation of 1600 feet, high in the mountains above Mt. Holly. The backyard photos were a run through for the Mt. Holly images. I wanted to make sure that I could easily assemble, disassemble and move my mirror rig. Mt Holly was a good choice because I knew that I didn’t need permission nor would anyone asked me to leave the State Game Lands/State Park. 

Because of the elevation, I had a good chance of being able to shoot with snow on the trees. I thought the snow might add to the surreal image of a mirror seemingly suspended in mid air hanging in the forest. One thing I didn’t think of was how my footprints from moving the snow would negatively impact the scene. After several attempts I started to pay much more attention to my walking about. I was able to minimize the negative “footprint affect”. The photographs below are some of the images I captured.

For Realz…

The reflection in these images is real. Nothing in my reflection image was “Photoshoped In”. Three of these images are the same shot with just a different cropping. All of them are 6 image HDR sets. I used Lightroom to pre-process the raw files providing lens correction and chromatic aberration removal. Next the images were then exported to Photomatix Pro for HDR processing. After Photomatix I finished the images in Photoshop CS5. The ladder legs below the mirror were cloned out of each image. After removing the ladder legs I followed my normal post-production work-flow. This includes standard Photoshop tools and the NIK plugins.

Now the question is…. Which one of these did I submit to the Digital Competition…?

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