One Four Challenge – Dec wk 4 – Polls.. and January’s challenge

Ok, jumping right in again and posting a few details for our challenge players to read about our challenge.

I thought this was going to be a quick post – turns out it’s a book – grab another cuppa 😛

We’re up to week 4 of December – Phew! ..and sharing our last image for December… we’re also including Polls – if we want to – for our readers to vote for the image they like best, of our 4 December editions.

Welcome to week 4 of  the December, One Four Challenge!!

Feedback:

Something I really want to touch on this week is the topic of feedback.  I can honestly say, when I started this challenge, I really didn’t give any thought to feedback. My thoughts were, simply a friendly way of being able to share our trials, experiments and wins, with other like minded folks, through the challenge.

Almost 2 months down the track, I can see that this is a very valuable place to leave feedback for each other…if we’re looking for it.

Because we are all at different stages in our learning and expertise, I thought it might be good to set in place, some guidelines for feedback.

What I’d like to ask is this… IF you would like feedback on what you have done for the week, please leave a comment at the end of your post that says something like – “I’d appreciate your thoughts or feedback” OR “feedback is welcome”.

Then and only then, leave feedback and please give kind and constructive comments. I think we are all doing this anyway.

Respectfully, if people don’t ask for feedback on any post, please don’t offer it – encouragement is always welcome though.

I hope this makes sense and that everyone is in agreement on this.  Thanks for reading this blurb!

Just want to share Neil Gaiman’s quote again – this is what I think the One Four Challenge is all about.

“Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.”

Neil Gaiman

Let’s continue encouraging and inspiring each other in all that we’re doing!

January’s challenge:

It goes on!! 😀  Our first challenge post for January is on the first Monday (5th), Aussie time.

I will be away from the computer for some of January, but I will be scheduling posts and will keep approving comments and will pop in when I can.  Stacey has generously offered to hop around the blogs, which she usually does and I know so many of us do this and I love it! Thank you all!! 😀

My image:

Once again, this is something new to me – that is, the extent that I’ve gone to, to create this image.  It took me a while, but it’s been a huge and fun learning curve. Yes! 😀

So here is my December week 4 image… click for a better, sharper view..

In the Shadows at Golden Hour

As you can see I’ve ‘plonked’ the truck on the side of the road, on the side of a hill, under some overhanging trees at golden hour.  The shadows are completely the opposite, so there was plenty of fiddling to do. I decided to keep a touch of light on the shadow side to show some of the details.

Many many things were tried here.  To cut out the truck, I used the Polyagonal Lasoo tool as suggested by Sarah – I hadn’t tried this tool before – thanks for the suggestion Sarah 😀

To place the truck I used the Perspective tool – tricky tricky!!

Yes the sky is big and bright, but it was big and bright on that afternoon.  You can see the golden light truly covering the landscape. There is a Graduated Neutral Density filter used on the sky as shown in the clouds, which has toned down the sky to an extent.

The truck has a touch of grunge and fauvism about it and I like it like that – I did this (the truck only) mainly using Topaz Adjust 5. The rest of the image has more of a natural feel about it. Having said that, I didn’t want this to be completely realistic.

Again, I’ve approached this 4th image as more of an artwork and I’m happy with what I’ve achieved this week!!

The original image:

Here’s where this image started for December…

..and below, my gallery from original to the 4th and final image for December’s challenge.

Click to view larger versions of the images.

In the Shadows – original

In the Shadows – week 1 process

Dec 2014 – Splitting the image..

In the Shadows – week 3 process

At sunset.. and in the shadows..

The old truck has proved to be as tricky as I thought it might be, but I’ve done a few things now, that I hadn’t tried before 😀 Yay!

If you have a favourite from my images, please feel welcome to vote.  Thank you.

..and once again, it’s now over to you!!

Kind comments and feedback are always welcome.. and I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone has done again this week 😀

Share your complete gallery of edited images with us this week and your original.  It will be good to see them together and where you began.

About the challenge and how it works:

This challenge is about processing 1 image in 4 different ways over 4 weeks.

We will all  process / post edit (our own chosen image) and share a different version each week.

Process it however you like… and tell us a bit about it. You don’t have to show the original image unless you’d like to.  (I’m going to show mine in week 4 along with the 4 variations from the month).

Try new things, experiment.  Be as creative or subtle as you wish to be.

Each week starts again on Monday (Aussie time) and closes off the following Sunday (at the end of the day), so there is a whole week for you to create your post, link up here and tag your post.

This is a perpetual challenge. We will do the 1st four Mondays of the month.

If there are 5 Mondays in a month – we’ll still only post on 4.

Thanks to all who have added a link to my post and have tagged – it’s made my visiting a lot easier this past week. I’ll include the same request here again this week. Thanks again.

Could I please ask everyone to TAG again… WP has been having some issues with pingbacks (unsure if this has been resolved yet, but best to be sure), which means myself and others are unaware of your post – Please TAG with One Four Challenge – thanks so much.

As well as a link, in your own post, would you mind leaving a link on my blog post too please – in comments if you could, this way we are aware of everyone’s blog posts. Thank you!

Have a fantastic week everyone… and on the 5th January we go again 😀

If you celebrate Christmas, or however you celebrate (or not)… Seasons Greetings to you all.

Robyn