Congratulations Alex Vincent, March 2024 PFRE Photographer of the Month! The theme this month was "Kitchen". Alex Vincent - #906 Yvonne Raaijmakers - #909 Peter Wingfield - #902 Here's what Alex has to say: Thank you for the award of Photographer of th ...
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The June 2018 PFRE Photographer of the Month contest has come to an end. The theme this month was foyer/entrance. Thank you to everyone who participated and the jurors who took time out of their busy schedules to contribute their votes and thoughtful commentary.
Congratulations to Garey Gomez from Decatur, Georgia; PFRE Photographer of the Month, June 2018.
Please feel free to view and comment on any of this month's entries here.
Here is what Garey had to say about the win:
Wow, what an honor! It has been a goal of mine to win Photographer of the Month for some time now and it feels incredible to get the win this month! Thank you to the jurors for volunteering their time, and all of the contestants this month. About three years ago, just before I shot my first real estate listing (on a whim for a close friend who is a full-time agent--his photographer was out of town and he needed this house shot ASAP!), I scrambled to find out as much information as possible to help me make photos that wouldn't embarrass me or my client. I immediately found the PFRE blog and the associated Flickr community, and dove right into this amazing resource. Those first photos were pretty terrible but my verticals were vertical, my client was really happy, and I had a lot of fun! I really took to it with much more passion than I ever thought was possible and since then, I have learned and grown so much from the information and constructive feedback I've received from this community. My sincerest thanks go to Larry for creating this blog, for assembling this community, and for sticking with it so diligently for so long; and to Brandon for his commitment to carrying the PFRE blog forward and helping it to grow and evolve.I had a lot of help over these past few years from the community as a whole. The Flickr group has been the largest source of feedback on my work, and reading feedback on the work of other photographers has been just as valuable. I am really happy to be a part of this community and hopefully, I can return the favor! And last but not least, my time working one-on-one with Tony Colangelo through his coaching has been invaluable to my growth in both the quality of my work, and in helping me understand myself, my goals for my career, and how to go after them. And he was definitely in my head while I was composing this shot!This photo was shot for an interior designer--my first ever full-day interior design shoot. I shot this with a 24mm tilt-shift lens with a 1.4x teleconverter, giving me a 34mm effective focal length. It was important to not only show the stairs, but also the mudroom lockers in the background. That forced me to move pretty far to the left, and as a result I had to shift the lens significantly to the right to get the composition you see here. In total, there are six frames blended together to create the final image; four ambient, and two using flash. Two of the ambient frames got me 95% there, and that is most of what you see the in this shot. For the flash frames, I have a 600w strobe outside the glass door directly across from the mudroom lockers shooting into a giant 7' parobolic umbrella with a white diffuser (probably overkill but it just about covered the entire window and worked great), a 360w bare-bulb flash at the top of the stairs bounced into the ceiling/wall joint; and lastly, a Speedlight on one of the steps just around the other side of the wall on the right of the frame, zoomed in to around 100mm so as to not spill light onto the ceiling in the foreground. Lastly, I partially covered the large windows immediately to the left of the camera with large black contractors plastic to darken the foreground. All layers were blended manually and color corrected in Photoshop, then received contrast and lighting adjustments in Luminar, and a few minor tweaks in Lightroom to finish.
Congratulations Gary! Well done and it was my favorite from this month as well!!
They all look great ! Congratulations to every photographers who reached to top 10.
Huge congratulations, Garey ... what an amazing capture! Couldn't be prouder of you, bud ! 🙂
Congrats Garey, very well deserved - your work is always top class.
Congratulations, Gary! Fantastic image and a well-deserved win.
Great work, Garey! Congratulations! And thanks for the detailed write-up of how you made the shot.
Thanks, Garett, Peter, Tony, Matt, Kerry, and Julie! Appreciate it!
Congratulations Garey! One of my favorite images of yours (there are lots to choose from) and a well-deserved win. Way to channel your #innerfrances on the foreground treatment! Fantastic execution in this shot.
Congratulations Garey! You've been killing it for a long time. Glad you hit that top spot. Amazing shot!