May's Photo Contest topic was "weekend morning." We had four entries.

Photo 1


Photo 2


Photo 3


Photo 4

 

tough choice and a tough topic to capture photographically

Stumped me!

(other than when I was driving away from a decrepit farmhouse on the way back from a B&B weekend getaway, DOH!, coulda been a contender!)

 

Ok, photo #1 is making me crazy as it looks so familiar. I'd guess 280 Northbound taken from De Anza Blvd with some famous company at the photographer's back. If so, I'm even more amazed as you really should show what this area looks like for the non Silicon Valley types and our notoriously thick traffic. Regardless, great photo!

Thomas, made it up to see the morning dew? Great DoF!

 

I had the same thought about #1, location wise, yet I'm sitting here staring it down looking for the photochomped out car location

 

I'm guessing 280 northbound from Winchester!

 

That's looking North from DeAnza, so that's South 280 (North 280 is on the right), Apple is over your left shoulder. Not a lot of cars need photochomping at dawn on a Saturday.

It more usually looks like this:

 

The people in L.A. are still wondering how you photochomp'd all the cars out.

 

oh shut up.

 

Love the shallow DoF on that grass blades shot.

 

#1 is really awesome! Can whoever took it give us more details?

I took the grass shot, was pure luck having it focus right. I kept snapping in different places with different manual focus settings. More water would have been nice.

 

Nice Bokeh! Perfect focus!

I had an idea involving golf clubs but never had the time to pull it together...

 

Since you asked, that'd be me.

As I noted in the submission thread, I got me and the wife up before dawn. The weather forcast had promised a clear sky, which is pretty unusual here, "gloomy till noon" is much more typical. We got to the DeAnza overcrossing over I280 as dawn was breaking. My theory was to show what's different about a weekend, as opposed to a weekday, the absence of traffic was the key. During the week, this is during pool hours already and I assume there's a lot of traffic about (I don't usually see it).

My wife (Cathy) is doing the driving and drives off down 280, turns around at Wolf, drives up to Foothill, back down to Wolf, does the the loop once more then picks me up again. I get 2 chances at the pic going North and 2 chances coming South, it was bad enough getting up at that time, I didn't want to drag it out longer than necessary. I'd already spied the location, see my daytime shot above, and I'd worked out where the sun should be at taht time of day. I poked the camera between the gap in the fence and the fence post.

On the first pass the sun was only just risen and there were some nice reflections off the back of the big sign, on the second pass the sun was just spilling across the road, as you can see by the really long shadows. It came out pretty good. I had the camera on "motor drive" and this was the best composition of a series of 5. The series also gave pictures of tarmac a second or so either side of the main frame, if any blemishes in the photo needed to be erased. (Photoshop layers and an opacity brush does a nice job.)

However, Cathy says it really was that empty from her point of view.

 

Some worthy dedication, and nicely executed - congratulations on a deserved win!

(I'd never thought of motor drive for shots to photoshop from - I'll have to work out how mine works! )