Being creative with the play of sun can sometimes be rewarding. After been selected for the final stage of a photo competition organized by FABEC, it turned out that this shot was good enough to be one of the three laureates.

During Spring 2011, an invitation caught my attention to participate in a photography competition with theme '"people behind the scenes" on the work floor related with the air traffic control. A typical office shot would probable not stand out, so thought about the possibilities how to portrait a meteorologist in an eye catching environment. Last year the tower was captured during a sunset, see picture of the month of May 2010, and as this years Spring was overwhelming sunny (sadly at the price of dull summer), tried this kind of shot again.

But in the end the meteorological observer on the balcony was way too small. Then mother nature gave a lending hand: when the sun was setting, the observer came in front of it. Sadly when cropping this picture, the heat waves gave a very blurry appearance. So tried it again later on a hazy day with less radiation. When employed, the difficulties at that moment were: sun had shifted more to the west so I couldn't catch the entire sun disk (no entry in a meadow with horses) and above all when the sun entered the man in front of it, the haze sudden lowered the power of the sunrays, so had to correct last minute ISO, aperture and shutter speed. At 2031 local time, exactly a one minute time window did occur to make the best of it, before the sun vanished in the haze.  

Technical detail: distance tower was around 1,5 km, tripod, 1,6x crop sensor of a DSR cam, zoom lens 50-500 mm @ 500 mm with 2x converter, aperture 5,6 (x2 = 11), shutter speed 1/250 seconds, ISO 640, manual push-the-button. Given these circumstances and used techniques, a perfect sharp shot was impossible. Nevertheless the originality was a good enough to be an eye catcher for the jury.

Making this kind of pictures was a good learning school: try to avoid using 2x converters as it softens a lot, use smaller aperture to increase sharpness, use remote controller to avoid vibration, use preferable a lens with fixed focal length to avoid chromatic aberration.