Location:
Post Office Square, Brisbane City
The setup:
Alan Warren gave me the heads up that the protest was being broken up and moved along. He posted some shots on Google+ as it was happening. When I arrived at 7.20am, I was in time to see the last protesters being carried away.
I took lots of shots of people chanting, which would have been alright if I’d not gotten anything else. I also shot wide-open (f/4), because I wanted some of the background to be blurred (and the observers – having them in focus would be distracting). This was at the expense of sharpness of the main subject, but considering the situation and ultimate use of the photo, I thought that was a reasonable trade-off.
A little birdy told me that it will cost the Brisbane City Council $30-40k to re-turf Post Office Square after the tents killed the grass. I think it would come back quickly enough without being re-turfed – bit of a waste of money don’tcha think? (And isn’t that what it’s all about?)
The camera & lens:
Camera: Canon EOS 400D
Lens: EF 75-300 f/4-5.6 II USM @ 80mm
Exposure: 1/500″ @ f/4.0, ISO 800 (Av)
Post processing:
Lightroom -
- Auto apply a B&W preset I have called “PSKiss-FilmStyleBW-01″. It auto applies curves (lights +60, darks -12, shadows -12), brightness +45, contrast +45, clarity +50 and increases the colour mixes in all channels, but mainly green and aqua.
- Crop to highlight the subject of the photo. Just before publishing, I cropped a bit further (Slightly cutting off the bloke on the right adds to the photo, I think, as it gives the feeling that there is more happening in the scene than we can see. Cutting too much off would be distracting.)
- Curves: lights +100, darks -40, shadows -10
- (ISO 800 resulted in lots of noise, but I left it in because I wanted it to be a bit gritty)
- Recovery +80, fill light +15, blacks +10
What I don’t like and/or would have done differently:
This is basically the shot I was after – though I didn’t know what it would look like before I got there, it wasn’t too hard to find the action and a good vantage point to see it.
What this photo beat to be chosen:
Other photos of the protest being cleaned up. I didn’t take the camera out of the bag for the rest of the day.
What do you think?
All constructive criticism is welcome! Please let me know what you think, and what you don’t like about the picture. Everything is on the table, including the setup, equipment used, and the post processing. Nothing is off-limits and I’m always eager to learn!
If you’d like to try your hand at editing this image, you can download the original sized image:
Please post the result as a comment and say how you did it!
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#project365 [306/365]: Occupy Brisbane – Brisbane Liberated – http://t.co/mKKKKLGi (incl post processing) #photography #occupybrisbane
Great pic, Sheridan. Has a real 60′s campus protest feel to it.
I think the grass issue is being beaten up by the council more than a little bit. They didn’t really need an excuse to move the protest on from the public space, but to rely upon such a p!ssweak excuse is weird. Grass grows back, you can’t stop it. Wasting money on resurfacing is idiotic.