It’s Gizmodo Australia Shooting Challenge prize time! There are some amazing photos in this bunch of entries, were you the winner?
Prizes
That’s right, it’s new prize time. We’ve got a Samsung Galaxy Camera to giveaway! The Galaxy Camera is a 16.3-megapixel camera wrapped around a 1.4GHz quad-core processor, complete with 1GB of RAM, a 4.8-inch touchscreen (1280×720), 8GB of built-in storage that expands via microSD card to 64GB, all running on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.
It also takes a microSIM card for sharing all those photos and videos you take. The Galaxy Camera leads the line-up of Samsung Smart Cameras for 2013, with the rest of the line packing fantastic image processors, beautiful designs and smart features like Wi-Fi for syncing photos and videos. The Galaxy Camera is the perfect addition to your digital life, and we’re excited to give one away each week to Gizmodo Shooting Challenge faithful.
The camera you’re playing for is valued at $699. We’ll be running this challenge over two weeks, with this week being the final round. The finalists from each week will go head to head in the final and the winner will be selected by Gizmodo editors for the grand prize!
Who Won The Second Galaxy Camera?
The first two weeks of this four-week challenge are Editor’s Choice, so this week and next week, your fearless editors will decide on who wins. In the two weeks after that, we’ll open it up to reader voting. So who won the first Editor’s Choice award for a Galaxy Camera? Our winner is…
Matt Walden! The awesome shot submitted by Matt nabbed him a Galaxy Camera. Congratulations on an image that took the Filter Frenzy challenge to a whole new level. Here’s the story behind the image:
I was hanging out with friends at observatory hill, thinking about all the filter options I could use. As I was framing up the scene as a photo it hit me, use an optical filter to do what the software filters are meant to do – focus the viewers attention to the subject. I used a polarising filter held out from the camera, along with a Canon 600D and 18-55mm lens. f/11 and 1/100 shutter speed. I did some tweaking in lightroom in terms of brightness, but wanted to make sure I maintain that base colour boost the filter brings. Here’s to sunny days with good mates!
Don’t think we forgot about the rest of you, though. We had an amazing 18 entries into this week’s competition and the race was a close one. We’ll be announcing the next round this afternoon. Stay tuned!
This Week’s Entries
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Jordan G
After being told by a friend about an abandoned factory near my residence I’ve been meaning to check it out! Now with this photo challenge I decided today is the day. Supposibly there is a lot of graffiti and even an old broken car inside which was my initial photo idea, however I couldn’t see because it has since been barbed-wired off. So instead, I took a few photos from peeking through the fence and through the barbed wire, this is the result. I’m hoping to get permission to go inside and photograph some more in the coming weeks.
I used a Sony DSC-HX5V, and Photoshop to apply the filter (vignette, contrast, levels and add noise), it gave a nice Lomography cross-processed effect.
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Joel Strickland
Shot with my Samsung Galaxy S3 Phone.
The light was beautiful and warm last night as I left the office. When I got back to my car the light was reflecting perfectly off the back of my car, so just had to take a pic. A few minutes in Snapseed App and this was the end result.
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Stephen Fryc
The Shot: It a very colourful mural thats quite new on the side of a cafe in Fremantle Western Australia (on South Terrace)
The settings: A hand held shot, across the road from the mural. Put the camera in AutoMode.
The technique: Wanted to get as much as I could in without too many other things like people or tree branches. I knew that because of the colours in the shot, over filtering would be stupid. It would look a mess. Instead I wanted to present a sharp and colourful image that was a bit different. The filters I used in (were in ) picasa. In order of use was first {1} A (colour) boost filter then {2} lomo-ish filter then {3} Colour correction then added a border and finally sharpened the image. If you want to see the original image before ANY filtering please goto: http://tinyurl.com/cgfaqrl
The Camera: Its an old canon G5 I have recently purchased from ebay for 37 dollars. It’s me and I love it. It is rugged as leather boots and thats what I like in a camera. No widescreen (its an old camera) but can shoot in raw format. You can set the iso but for this shot I trusted the “auto” shot function which is pretty good.
The Story: Since I got the canon G5 camera I made a decision to carry it with me. It lives in a shoulder bag. Ok so what I hear you ask ? Well it goes with me EVERYTIME I go out because I’m always seeing good photos and always miss out on the shot. I was walking home from having my car at the garage and I had the camera (ta Da !!) and saw this fantastic mural. I like to use filters but really don’t like the overuse of filters. The canon was considered a semi professional camera in its day.
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Robin Molen-Grigull
Hi, i have been reading Gizmodo for about 3 years now and thought it was about time i entered one of the photography competitions, using what i had (Samsung galaxy phone). I went out early to try to catch that morning sunshine. Although the colors are very warm it was absolutely freezing and my hands were numb by the time i got back home, climbing straight back into bed.
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Andrew Palmer
I took this photo on my Samsung Galaxy SII phone and used the grunge filter on Snapseed.
One of my colleagues at work has been on holidays and just got engaged, so to give him a nice surprise on Monday we wrapped his desk in glad wrap and filled his cubicle with balloons. Can’t wait to see his face! This photo is of the balloons through the glad wrap keeping them from spilling out.
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Max Rozen
F/16 | 17mm | 1 second exposure
We were having pre-drinks on Saturday night getting ready to go out, and a spark went off in my head to see what would happen if we let off 25 sparklers at the same time. Here’s the result – but the photo doesn’t quite convey the amount of heat this set-up gave off. It was rather intense!
Filter applied was the “Direct Positive” preset in Lightroom 4.2
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David Tsai
I spent days trying to get this exact shot of this glorious Golden Retriever bolting through the gate. He’s very lazy, so I pretty much only got two chances a day before he decide he’s had enough of chasing a ball.
I used the Camera FV-5 app on my HTC One X to drop the exposure time and manually set the ISO. I then used Snapseed to touch up the colours and apply the tilt-shift.
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Peter Byrnes
Olympus TG2, F2.8, 1/640 sec, ISO-100
About 5kms from our camp on Warroora Station is an area called the Football Field. This is a shallow, sandy area on Ningaloo Reef that is surrounded by coral reef and is the size of, you guessed it, a football field. Inside this wonder there are fish by the bucket loads, many stingrays, a few turtles and a couple of sharks. The fish are colourful, stingrays glide gracefully, turtles pose for the camera and the sharks are timid but quite relaxed. This turtle stayed with me for a few minutes while his photo was taken. I then put a “plastic wrap” filter on the photo which brings the turtle out from the screen, almost touchable.
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Michael Chong
This shot was shot with a Nikon D5100 + 50mm f1.8G lens, Shutter: 1/500; f10; ISO 100
This photo is a boys day out with one of my the guys wanting to try out kite surfing on the beach surf (Mains Beach, Gold Coast). Luckily when we got to a random stretch of beach we found some other local kite surfers wrapping up for the day. The two friendly men were generous enough to give my mate some friendly tips about how to tackle kite surfing in the surf and stuck around to make sure my mate wouldn’t get in trouble. This photo with the danger surf sign in picture with my mate in the distance summaries my feeling of how the whole situation felt. Throwing in a warm filter to bring out the impact of the red sign and to bring out the blue of the kite using lightroom.
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Christopher Levinson
I took this just as I got back from a walk to get some coffee earlier this afternoon as we’d run out. I hadn’t really planned to go out today and it was incredibly sunny on the way there, but on the way back the clouds had rolled in and just as I got back I saw this rainbow appear over the ocean. I quickly ran upstairs like a mad man to grab my DSLR to try and get a photo before it vanished. Sure enough the rainbow disappeared about a minute later but I managed to get this, so I guess it was lucky we ran out of coffee otherwise I might never have seen it!
The camera I took it with is my Canon 6D and I used the Canon 24-105 f/4 L IS lens. The image is originally a 3 shot HDR image, with the images taken at 1/250 sec, 1/1000 sec and 1/60 sec @ f/9, ISO 800, all handheld. I then combined them in Photomatix Pro to create the HDR image, which was my attempt to simulate a kind of luminescent, oversaturated filter effect like you often see on Instagram. I also edited it in Nik Color Efex Pro and used some of the filters there to refine the detail and add a bit more contrast to make the image pop. I also used a UV filter on the lens as, being near the ocean, I didn’t want the lens to pick up any grit or dirt on the wind.
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Cameron Gage
This photo was taken at stop-off during a sailing trip on the weekend. This photo is of my partner’s parents who have been together for 30 years and counting. We were walking through the shared properties of those that lived in the area, which was only accessible by boat.
The photo was originally taken in colour and then had a filter applied using Alien Skin Exposure 4. It is a black & white infra-red filter (Kodak HIE) with a strong , thin halation and grain added. I think the filter gives it an other-worldly feeling that is dark but somewhat melancholic as well.
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Kim Sinclair
I often head out to walk the dog late in the day with the other half and now that it is getting dark earlier, I haven’t bothered to take my camera but usually have my trusty mobile phone.
I took this photo of an amazing old house in our area that is on a fairly busy intersection so the view of it is through signs of various kinds, power lines and poles.
I took the photo with my Galaxy S2 camera then used the Grunge filter in Snapseed, so rather than making the image more pristine, I made it look older and it hid a lot of the modern trappings like signage.
I fine tuned the image in Snapseed to get what I thought looked better. It was hard to see on a phone screen really but I am fairly happy with what I see on my computer screen.
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David Johnson
This was taken in the Snowy Mountains on Thursday night using a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ35 with f/3.6, 1/60s, ISO-80, -1.7 exposure bias.
This is an Infrared shot and it’s straight out of camera, I know it’s for processing filters but I went minimalist for this challenge and did it by luck with a fly staying still and the wind stopping just long enough to make this work.
Camera: Canon 600D
ISO: 400
Lens : Sigma10-20 f:3.5
fstop: f:11
Shutter time: 3.2 sec
Filter: IR R72
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Sandro Renda
Took this during a sunny but cloudy day. Being very hot and carrying around heavy gear, decided to take a long exposure shot of the wheel in Brisbane….During the day.
Gear and Settings used:
Sony a77v
Toby Focus gorillapod
Hoya ND400 Filterf/22
30 sec
ISO-50
16mmFilter Effects: ColorEfex Pro 2
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Thomas Barber
Used a 35mm Lens on a Nikon D80 to take a photo of the night sky and the street lights below. Used a plastic water bottle with a hole cut in the bottom of it as a filter to distort the lights.
f/1.8
1/5
ISO1000
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Phillip Mantica
Got home from work, grabbed my bag, umm’d and aaa’d about which lenses to take, as I didn’t want to take the whole camera bag, then headed off for a quick beach walk.
As I got to Dee Why beach, there was a smudge of a rainbow on the horizon. My 50mm and 17mm wide angle were not the going to cut it, so I carried on walking, a little disappointed that I only got to see the tail-end of the show. But then the rainbow just started to grow, and grow. It was crazy, as the sun dipped down in the west, it was reflecting off a huge rainstorm coming in from the east. The a second rainbow appeared and it just got better after that. Enough to use the wide angle!
Everyone had stopped along the beach front and we were all watching the rainbow arches get bigger – then the rain front rolled over us and we all bolted for cover. I ended up under the Dee Why swimming clubs overhang with a bunch of people all still staring at the amazing sight.
This final pic was with a Canon 5D II, 17-40mm lens, at 17mm, f/18, ISO 2500, with a polariser and is an HDR (using PS) of 3 shots, 0,-1,-2EV, 1/320 – 1/80. I under exposed to get more definition in the clouds and post processed in Lightroom, added a little vignette to isolate the rainbow a little more. I needed the high ISO as this was handheld and not a lot of light. Btw why is this a filters picture? Well, I think I found the biggest filter in the world, the rain storm, reflecting and filtering the sunset! Eco friendly too 😉
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Stuart
100mm | 1/80 sec | ISO 100 | F/2.8
My 3 year old has started to pic up my camera and can actually take some ok photos, he’ll be entering here soon…..So this weekend we had a photo expedition in our back yard, we took photos of trees, flowers, grass, cats and a few of each other taking photos. This is my Favorite shot, and in line with this week’s theme I have applied a LR filter called “Center stage”.
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