Nine - Hildebrand

Today's photograph is one of those that is soooo close to being something special, but missed by just the smallest of margins. It's still one of my favorites from this past year though. Rookie driver J.R. Hildebrand was the fastest rookie at the Indy 500 this year, and came one turn away from actually winning the race. Instead he put it in the wall in the last corner and slid around to cross the line in second place. This shot was as taken as he prepared to go out for some practice shots. This one is unusal though because almost all drivers have their helmets on and buckled before they get in the car. For some reason J.R. stepped in the car and stood there, finishing his preparations. With crew members on either side looking at him, with the illusion of looking up at him (really they are looking more forward, but perspective makes him seem larger and taller) he really becomes the focus point of the photo. The timing was almost perfect, except for the female crew member on the right has her eyes only half way open. The other problem with the shot is why it became black and white. My wide angle lens was on my daughters camera that I was using as a second body that day. I had it in aperture priority mode, and with only 3 focus/exposure points it grabbed an exposure point that was on his dark suit. This caused the entire photo to be overexposed and the colors washed out. I tried to save it by converting it to black and white, which worked pretty well because the over exposure kept more details in the darker parts of the image.

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The over exposure error meant I lost almost all of the detail in the sky. After a while that really started bothering me, and I decided to do some surgery on it. I pulled the sky from one of my pictures in Montana and added that to try to give the shot a little more drama. A liked it enough at the time to submit that version of the photo to the State Fair. Now I prefer the original sky - I think the clouds are too much of a distraction. The empty sky does a better job of balancing the photo as well, keeping the top of the photo light while the bottom has the weight, or darkeness.

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