One Giant Leap

Photo of the Day

Today is a day that I celebrate for a couple of reasons. One of them is the fact that it is my father’s birthday. In 1969 to celebrate his birthday NASA had the first man land on the moon. That man was a Purdue graduate by the name of Neil Armstrong. Last year while I was in Chicago Neil once again left us. Purdue had a memorial for this historic figure on campus. I was actually heading that way to make a picture of his statue decorated when I stumbled across the memorial. I quickly made a couple of pictures, but then I watched the ceremony. I had an idea for a way to process the photo so I decided to try something different.

Technical Data

This was a shot where I really had new lens syndrome going on. I only took the 70-20mm lens that I was renting on the shoot. It really made me limited to what I could shoot with a large crowd. As with all of my new lenses though I seemed to find a way to shoot everything with it. That was the case here. I had to just try and get what I could with the lens that I brought. I like what I was able to capture, and this is one of my favorite pictures from last year.

To get the look of the photo I used a Matt Kloskowski preset called ‘the 300 look’. That preset basically strips the entire photo of any color but red. I added the blue back into the photo, and I was done. I think that is was very effective. I normally don’t like stripping just some of the colors from the photo, but here I set the flag apart for sure.