Photo of the Day
With the Daytona 500 coming up racing is in the spotlight for a while. I used to really be into the sport, maybe too much. For some reason though with all of the changes they completely lost me. I tune in for a few bits of races, but the days of watching an entire race are long gone. I still do pay a bit of attention this time of the year though to the race. It is the biggest one of the year after all.
If you watched NASCAR in the 90’s like myself you had to admire Dale Earnhardt. He was the face of the sport. Twelve years ago today he was killed while blocking for the two cars that he owned. That was a day that I will not forget. We had a party to watch the race, and Dales wreck was a bad way to end it. When the party broke up I remember hitting the refresh button on the ESPN website waiting for some kind of news. Sadly the news was not good, and the sport lost a legend.
This statue depicts Dale at a much better time though. It shows him just after his lone Daytona 500 win fifteen years ago in 1998. When I went to Daytona in 2009 to see the Great American Race I put this statue on my list of things to photograph. I took the straight on shot that I always seem to do of statues. Then I saw this huge sign about on the side. I decided to give this angle a try, and it really seemed to work.
Technical Data
I took this jpeg and ran it through Lightroom to tweak it a bit. I wanted to bring out some of the colors, but also to tone down a couple of them as well. The grass around the statue was very bright. It seemed way too bright for me. The trick here is that you can’t adjust the greens. It will do nothing. Toning down the yellow will get the greens where you want them. I also used the clone tool in Lightroom to help get rid of an annoying lamppost in the upper right hand corner. A few tweaks of the sliders, and this image was ready to be exported to here.
Dave Wegiel Photography 