Videotect: Skyways of Minnesota

There were some great entries into the very first Videotect competition held by the AIA MN and Architecture Minnesota.

Over 1,500 unique viewers cast their votes for viewers favorites, and Craig Hinrichs and I were thrilled to make the top 5. Which allowed our film to be viewed at the Videotect Awards at the Walker Art Center.

After tax season I'll be sure to have some follow up thoughts on this whole endeavor. For now. Enjoy the film and if you have any thoughts you like to share here. I'd love to keep the discussion about the skyways going.

There's a GREAT write up by Scott P Donaldson

The top five finalists were (in order of appearance)

1) IDE[A]

2) Tucker

3) Lindau

4) O'Malley

5) Siemers

The viewers choice was chosen from that 5 was Tucker
It got a lot of laughs in the audience, it was nicely executed, and it was a good story.

Honorable Mentions went to
1 IDE[A], 3 Lindau, and 2 Tucker
1 was beautiful and interesting, with good pacing.
3 was a humorous discussion of the opposing perspectives of the skyways, but yet impossible to watch without eye strain, even with the red blue glasses
2 (as described above)

The judges' selection for winner was.... Davy
This film focused on one simplistic criticism that persists about the skyways, calling them mindless walkways that at times feel like they lead to nowhere. There's an interesting write up about the "zombie" perspective by Steve Berg at the Minnpost.com, I have to disagree with the notion that skyways are leading downtown in the wrong direction.

What the judges had to say about their selection:
"...it was clear"..."... It had a perspective that was emotional..."...it was experimental..."...it had a clear beginning middle and end..."...it resonated with me..."

Some interesting articles about the competition were written as well. I've posted my own thoughts as comments to some of those articles.

Hannah Feder

MinnPost - Cityscape: Videos explore life in Twin Cities skyways by Steve Berg

The Journal - Video contest winner critiques the skyway by Andre Eggert

the line - Skyway video contest inspires many different impressions of the indoor walkways

Selective Color Correction - A Before and After

Remember back in college, when your professor didn't care that you also had 3 other assignments due the same week as their 10pg paper and how they weren't thrilled to hear of your hard drive failing at the last minute. Well in Architectural Photography, your client doesn't always have the luxury of waiting for the best time of year to document their project and unless your a demi-god, it's not likely that you control the weather. So what do you do if say... it is the middle of a drought, in a southern state, that has dry grass?

Enter Selective Color Correction as part of the equation of post-production. This can be a lengthy or short process depending on the retouch artist and the complexity of the image. That's why a client's input on their final angles is critical to saving both time and money.

While this isn't a tutorial, it is a demonstration of three steps I used for a recent project.

Step 1: Initial Post production Develop the photo as far as possible before special retouching.

Not a bad image, but we don't want to distract our audience with dead grass.

Step 2: Color correct only the area you want to affect. This can be in Photoshop or other software, but it really depends on the complexity of the image.

Now that's better, but there's a little overgrowth that we can help

Step 3: Clean up and final retouch. This is where you take the areas that were affected by the selective color correction and you blend un even areas of blotchy color, eliminate unwanted elements, and generally make the image look like it was never retouched in the first place. (Unless your a pixel peeper, and if you're looking that hard, the I didn't do a great job of making a compelling image to begin with.)

We've blended the grass, eliminated the traffic cone by the doors, and weeded the path. You may notice some areas that can be cleaned up further, but this will be used as a draft for client review.