11/24/2009

Jeff	Sara
Click image to enlarge	Click image to enlarge
Today’s photo is brought to you by the letter “U”.	This image actually took quite a bit of creativity and attention to detail to make happen with my little point and shoot.  (view large) I have been playing with this vase a bit lately (you can actually see it in the 11/19/2009 post).  Here’s the steps I took to capture this image. I first placed the vase on my black dresser to ensure that the reflections would only appear black. Grabbing a bunch of big hardcovers from my bookshelf, I played with height so I could get the whole vase with an emphasis on the bottom.  (At this point I took a couple, failed, test shots). Playing with the shutter time and hand-lighting from my pen light, I settled on 2 seconds at f/3.6, fluttering the pen light above the lamp (and out of shooting range) for the entire time the shutter was open. In order to get the bottom of the vase in focus (my camera does not have manual, or even adjustable, focus) I tipped the camera down to focus on the bottom while having the bedroom light on.  I then kept my finger compressed on the shutter button halfway, while carefully placing the camera down and shutting off the light via the light switch.  After the light was off, I fully compressed the shutter on a two second delay, and quickly transitioned to manipulating the pen light. Repeated steps 1-4 after realizing that I should really have washed the vase first so all the fingerprints on it weren’t drastically noticeable. My post-processing included a slight adjustment of both contrast and brightness, as well as the cloning out of dust particles that were illuminated accidentally.

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