Award-winning photography is often a fortuitous combination of skill and luck as was the first-place winner of the Commercial division and LexJet Sunset Award winner at the 2012 Professional Photographers of North Carolina print completion, Gregory Georges.
Georges co-owns Jonathan Penney Inc., a New York-based fine art print making business, with the company’s founder, Jonathan Penney. The skill is obvious in the presentation of the image, Bridge Over Water. The luck was in finding the scene at the right time.
Georges captured the image at the Conde B. McCullough Memorial Bridge over Coos Bay on US 101 in North Bend, Oregon, with a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III using an EF70-200 at 148mm set to 1/320 @f/8.0 and ISO 100.
“I was fascinated by this beautiful old bridge. It was near sunset with lots of clouds and not much color, so it was very monochromatic to begin with. I got very compulsive about locking-down my tripod, and using mirror lock-up to minimize vibrations to get the clearest image I could,” explains Georges.
Equally important, says Georges, was the combination of Adobe Camera RAW 7 RAW file conversion and black-and-white conversion done in Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro 2.0. “Silver Efex has absolutely amazing features that really bring out the best in a black and white image,” says Georges. “My vision was to make the print look like a mechanical pencil sketch without pure black tone and yet still show extremely fine detail.”
He printed on a fine art watercolor paper at competition size – 16″ x 20″ – on an Epson Stylus Pro 3880. Georges says that those who saw the print at competition were amazed by the amount of detail in the image, especially the individual cars crossing the bridge and fine line detail of the wires on the bridge.
“Monitors, color calibration tools, media, ink technologies and printers are so awesome now that if you edit it well on your computer you will get an amazing print. I also use ColorByte Software’s ImagePrint RIP, because it’s giving me extraordinary paper profiles,” adds Georges.
For more information about Jonathan Penney Inc., go to www.jonathanpenney.com.
