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Image banner for the February 2024 PFRE Photographer of the Month Winner Art Ibewuike, with a featured image of his winning photo titled "Living Room or Family Room""

Congratulations to Art Ibewuike, February 2024 PFRE Photographer of the Month! The theme this month was "Living Room or Family Room". Art Ibewuike - #895 Paul-Dan Dragoman - #898 Peter Wingfield - #900 Here's what Art has to say: Thank you so much for ...

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Congratulations Travis Rowan – January PFRE Photographer of The Month

In: 
Published: 23/01/2017

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Congratulations to Travis Rowan who the jury has voted PFRE Photographer of the Month for January. This is Travis’s third win as the PFRE Photographer of the Month. The other two wins were September 2016 and September 2015.

There were a huge number of great twilight shots this month! Here are the entries that the jurors awarded points to this month in order of points awarded:

  1. Travis Rowan
  2. Aaron Kraft
  3. Canek Estrada
  4. Anders Carlson
  5. Dave Spencer
  6. Ollie Paterson
  7. Andrew Pece
  8. Caleb Vandermeer
  9. Brad Barnson
  10. Cody Ellis
  11. Gary Kasl

Here are Travis's comments:

Wow, there were a lot of great images again this month and I appreciate being recognized. Thanks very much to Larry for his hard work and to my colleagues for their votes and comments. It means a lot.

This home on the Big Island, belongs to a very successful TV writer and was put on the market for $16M. In addition to producing a property video, the brief was to shoot up to 15 images and only focus on the key areas.

I love it when a client has this type of marketing approach; targeted marketing with fewer images = higher quality. A nice contrast to the usual real estate MLS blast. This enables me to slow down a bit and shoot more carefully like I would for an architect or designer.

Of the the 50 or so frames that I captured, the final image is comprised of 22 different frames composited to taste. Some ambients, several speedlight pops to mimic and supplement the direction of the existing light and get cleaner details and more accurate colors. All controlled by a camranger and radio slaves.

Unfortunately, the pool lighting was not working at the time of the shoot, which no longer surprises me. In my experience, the pool lights only work 50% of the time even in this category of home. Usually just a breaker or the matter of a light bulb having burned out 6 months ago…but too much to solve as twilight is falling.

Because of this, I keep a couple of small underwater video lights in my bag ready for deployment. I have the Light & Motion Sola 800 and 2000. Small, rechargeable LED designed for scuba diving. They are pretty handy, three different powers of Daylight balanced, continuous light and you can place them anywhere in the pool to add a glow. There are less expensive options out there now. I’m looking into the Lume Cubes for this same purpose.

I just handheld the light below the surface at various spots around the pool while I collected the pool exposures. In the edit I chose to leave the foreground water fairly dark which allowed the reflections to sing and guide the eye to the brighter part of the image which was the home.

This is the part about compositing that I really like. I have total control over the final image as long as I collect all the necessary parts during the shoot. I could easily go back today and re-edit a different ‘feeling’ in to the image using the a few of the other frames.

It’s a good time to be a photographer, so many fun tools at my disposal and I’m stoked to be a part of this community. Happy New Year.

PFRE Photographer of the Month Winners:

Larry Lohrman

9 comments on “Congratulations Travis Rowan – January PFRE Photographer of The Month”

  1. Congrats Travis on your twilight photo and congrats to all the other photographers twilight photos! They are all gorgeous photos!

  2. Looking at the Huge number of entries and very impressed. This group has a lot of very talented photographers. I was a little unswayed though as to how the judges came to the ranking.

  3. Congrats Travis on a truly well-deserved win … a stellar composition combined with spot-on interior lighting (over a large area, no less!) made your image, IMO, a clear choice to win the contest. Well done!

  4. Congrats Travis on a terrific image. There really were a large amount of fantastic images this month, so a very good competition to win.

  5. @Cindy, @Tony, @Hamish, @Matt, @Andy, @Brandon and @Tim
    Thank you for the comments. It means a lot. There's a lot of inspiring work going on in this PFRE community and it no doubt pushes me to continually raise my own standards to try and keep up with you all. Aloha

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