"Phantom Hikers"
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About The Winning Photo:
This was taken while we were riding the sky chair of Snow Summit in
Big Bear, California.
In winter time, this is the lift they use to carry the skiers and
snowboarders to the top of the snow summit. In summer, it takes
hikers, mountain bikers and sightseers to the top of the mountain.
On our way down, I saw these four hikers and noticed right away that
they were casting long shadows because it was already late afternoon.
I took several shots of them, and this one is when they were almost
directly underneath our chair.
When i uploaded this, I noticed that one of the hikers' shirt was
light brownish-grayish in color and it was something similar to the
color of the ground , some part of him blended with the color of the
ground and they seemed invisble. I desaturated the photo,overexposed
it a little bit and applied that tint using the channel mixer in
photoshop!
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-- from *DEE~ - (?)Remedy Medina aka usclabdog
My name is Remedy Medina, I'm a forty-one year-old lover of one and
father of two adorable kids.
I was born in Navotas, a fishing town north of Metro Manila. I'm a
Medical Technologist by profession .
People always ask me about my name, which was my father's brilliant
idea. His full name is Renato Medina, and he combined the first
syllable of his first name and two syllables of the last name,saying
it's way better than naming me Renato Medina Jr. and be called the
generic name "junior'' or "jr" as most first or only male Filipino
children in the family are called.
My parents married kinda late and it took them almost three years
before I finally came out, so they also thought of me as the "cure"
for all those years of sadness and loneliness of not having a child.
Or so they thought .
My father really wanted me to become a doctor, he thought it would be
really cool for me to be called "Dr. Remedy." lol.
Anyway my love for photography started because of the desire to
photograph my kids.
My first camera was a Canon Powershot G2, which was one of the first
advanced point and shoot at that time. It took nice pictures, but the
lag time between shots was really long, and it was quite slow to
focus sometimes so I decided to buy a Canon 20D which is still the
camera I'm using now.
I have several lenses, the UWA (ultra-wide angle) 10-22 mm, the 100mm
macro, the kit lens 17-85mm and 70-300 mm. I've been waiting for the
5D upgrade for a while, and I'm also thinking of buying the 40D
instead, as I want to convert my 20D with an IR sensor.
I don't know if I have a unique style. I take a lot of landscape
photos because I'm fortunate enough to be here in California where
there are a many magnificent parks and reserves. I do admire the
works of other Filipino photographers here. We may be the land of
ghost employees and ghost voters, but when it comes to photography,
there are so many excellent Kabayan photographers out there.
Right now I would like to learn more about landscape and outdoor
photography. The area that I need to learn more about is proper
exposure with this kind of photography.
I'd also like to learn more about how to use Photoshop for digital
darkroom processing.
Five years from now, I'm gonna have an exhibit!
Like this is exhibit A, and that is exhibit B! (I watch a lot of CSI *
lol*)
I've asked myself, what do I want to do with photography aside from
taking landscapes and family photos? And the dream for me would be to
do a photo documentary or photo essay. I really want to show how the
other half of us lives.
We always focus on the great ones, but I would like to honor the
little people.
Growing up, I was very impressed by the images that I saw on Life and
Time magazine. A lot of those pictures defined a period in history,
but a lot of them also became the instrument of advocacy: a patient
dying of HIV, a vulture waiting for a child to die in famine-stricken
Africa.
Those images made a difference. Five years is a long time, plenty
of time to chase a dream. My wife is now a nurse, my kids are going
to be teenagers by that time and this is America, yeah, so why not?
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The three photos that make me proud, and why:
This was taken at the San Francisco Bay. It was my first time to
use a circular polarizer, and there's too much vignetting on the
upper right side but nevertheless I like this photo a lot because of
the way the cloud mimics the line of the pier.
I took this photo of my son, soon after I saw in the news the
aftermath of the monks' protest rally in Burma. I have a lot of
Burmese friends at work, a lot of them were professors and doctors in
Burma but now are working as lab assistants. Having had a
similar experience during the time of Marcos' dictatorship in the
Philippines, I really feel empathy for the people of Burma.
I didn't know how important a GND (graduated neutral density) filter
is, until I saw other photographers at Glacier Point using theirs. I
was still shooting JPEG at the time, and I could have done a better
job in post-
processing this if I got it in RAW. Still, it's precious to me
because it will always remind me how spectacular it was during that
sundown at Yosemite.
Article edited by *DEE~
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