Welcome to Shutter Notes, our new weekly community feature. Shutter Notes will be a chance to get to know our community members a bit better. Each member will share a little bit about themselves and an image theyā€™ve chosen.

Arthur Hall is retired and living between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Smoky Mountains. When he was younger he spent a lot of time creating images with a 35mm film camera. As with many of us, life then takes over and it would be up until around 2019 that Arthur got back into photography.

The image Arthur has shared is from a construction site of the New Belgium brewery in Asheville, NC. He would describe this image like an impending storm. Steelwork is heavy, airborne, urgent and dangerous.

Arthur

How Arthur created this image

After many tries, he felt that he finally extracted his vision from the RAW file. Arthur likes the dramatic sky and the silhouetted working leaning into space along with the movement evident in the chain. He describes this as dark but not noire and leaned into the tones more and more. These dark tones resonated with him and allowed him to push emotions in line with how he felt about the story.

Arthur used ACDSee Professional for cropping, sharpness and took the image into Silver Efex ā€” Nik Collection by DxO to get the silhouetting and sky the way he wanted it. In the process of creating this image, he learned that timing and the benefit of burst mode to catch a moment helped when the chain bent in the worker’s hands. He also learned to better control tones to his advantage rather than to just make the image read well.

Please join us in the Photofocus Community and find the complete description and instructions on how to submit your image for consideration here.

Please only submit one image at a time and for now only one submission per person. Weā€™ll ask for more at a later date if we need them. If you have any questions, comment here or send me a message within the community. We look forward to your submissions.

If you have any photographer friends you know would enjoy or benefit from being in the Photofocus Community, be sure to invite them!