There was some pressure on me (ahem) to enter this challenge and score well, so I put a little more effort into it than usual. I had a similar idea that I've been saving for months, but this seemed like a promising variation. I expect a few others to go with a "pea" pun... Crabappl3 shocked me by mentioning "world peas" in chat after I'd already bought the materials! :-(
The "peas" are 1/2" balls of Playdoh that I mixed to get the green color and then molded into rough pea shapes. I sealed them with two coats of clear nail polish and painted them with blue and white nail polish (using a fuzzy pipe cleaner to dab on the cloud details). I used long pins pushed into styrofoam to hold the peas for drying. FWIW, I started this using real peas, but I couldn't get enough detail on them with the thick nail polish, so I had to supersize it.
I placed the peas on an oversized serving fork and dipped them in boiling water to get the steam (which is why I chose nail polish). I had a monolight in the back to illuminate the steam (in front of black fabric) and another monolight with a shoot-through umbrella in front to light the peas.
Processing: Combined two exposures processed from the same RAW capture to lighten the peas without blowing out the highlights. Saturation, colorizing, dodging and burning. Desaturated the fork and cloned out imperfections, blurred the steam to minimize grain, and cloned the top left edges of the peas a little to reduce glare.
I'm pretty happy that the shot turned out like I envisioned... eventually. What a pain in the neck though! It was a tough setup, so I certainly hope others appreciate the image.
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Place: 7 out of 144 Avg (all users): 6.6564 Avg (commenters): 8.0000 Avg (participants): 6.3902 Avg (non-participants): 6.8069 Views since voting: 8317 Views during voting: 503 Votes: 227 Comments: 26 Favorites: 5 (view)
Thought this pic was great. Gave it a 9 and expected it to ribbon. I sure wondered about the size/detail on the peas but your explanation answers that question. The steam was a neat touch too.
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