August 20, 2009 – Party on the deck

1/125

f11

ISO 200

18mm

JPEG

Our company (HowStuffWorks.com) just launched the first portion of our social networking platform, so we had a party out on the deck (15 floors up) to celebrate. The weather was nice, but really overcast.

I wanted to get a photo that would capture how beautiful the view of the other buildings can be, but also capture the fun everyone was having. That was hard, and here is what I thought was my bast effort.

I shot this at a small aperture (f11) in order to get the people in front (who were about 18 feet away) in focus along with all of the buildings in the back. I might have been able to use a wider aperture, but they were laughing and I didn't have much time to react. So I went with an aperture I knew would do the job.

I used Photoshop Elements to correct most of the distortion from the wide angle shot. I also cropped the photo in a way to leave out the large trash can that was by the table of food on the right.

There were a couple of things I think that could have made this photo better. First, I should have shot it in RAW mode for more post-processing control over the exposure, contrast, and color. But alas, I had left it in JPEG mode after shooting the bees the day before. Second, I wish there were another couple of people talking in the empty space where you can see the tower crane. Ideally, I would have liked them to have been 15-20 feet from the camera.