At the Rock Wall

For the past few weeks I have been working on a series of photos for my digital photography class.  The assignment was pretty wide open, but one option was a photojournalism series of nine photos.  I decided to do a series about rock wall climbing.  Basically the nine photos show the process of going on a climb.  Here are two from the series:

ISO 2000 50mm 0ev f/3.5 1/125

ISO 2000 50mm 0 ev f/3.5 1/125

Lighting was a huge challenge for this series.  I used my 50mm lens because I knew I would need a low f-stop.  I am also using a pretty high ISO.  These images are HDR images, processed using Photomatix.  After that, I put them in Photoshop and put a gradient mask on them.  I did that because I found the color in the originals was pretty distracting.  I also did noise reduction and sharpening in Photoshop.

For the assignment the prints are about 15×10.  I am turning in the assignment today, so wish me luck.

Cheers!