Tribute to gaurawa's brilliant Band of Brothers:
Trying to give a slightly different feel to the same image, composing a little differently and - most importantly - finding a way to capture the glow of the matches after being blown out. Taking the heroic symbolism a little further - showing an \"inner light\" rather than the matches looking cold and dead. This proved a very difficult feat of timing and exposure.
I now have a new-found respect for that gaurawa's patience. My setup was quite complicated:
100-400L IS, stabiliser turned off, tripod, 25mm extension tube, mirror lockup, remote release.
Two Sigma EF-500's, wireless master and slave, the master on an off-camera hotshoe cable to the right of the matches lighting them from the side, the slave underneath and behind the matches pointing up to light the smoke.
Manual mode with 6 seconds to catch the glow. Flash exposure locked (and mirror locked up) before igniting the matches, and set to underexpose by 2/3 of a stop. Miniature blowtorch used to light the matches. Matches attached to masking tape stretched between two bottles.
The most time-consuming part was setting up a new set of matches each time, then re-focusing on them, adjusting lighting using modelling flash and DOF preview, switching room lights on and off to do this, etc :) Ran out of matches in the end, this is the best of what i came up with.
Postprocessing:
Crop, slight bit of cloning to remove dust on matches and bit of distracting smoke in the lower-left corner, adjust colour balance to make smoke bluer as in the original, adjust contrast a tiny bit to make background true black, resize, sharpen, add border.
Statistics
Place: 20 out of 141 Avg (all users): 6.7525 Avg (commenters): 7.9286 Avg (participants): 6.4535 Avg (non-participants): 6.9741 Views since voting: 2579 Views during voting: 359 Votes: 202 Comments: 19 Favorites: 4 (view)
First, let me say that I am not a professional or even a very good amature photographer, so you may want to take my comments with a grain of salt.
Meeting the Challenge: You did excellently here. You definitely captured the spirit of the original, paying attention to details such as the border.
Title: This is where you put your own spin on it. The title defines the image well, and the recently extinguished look made this tribute photo uniquely yours.
Composition / Color: You said you wanted to show the inner light of the matches, rather than making them look cold and dead. You definitely achieved your goal. The red glow is what makes this photo have a strong emotional impact, which, in my opinion, takes it further than the original.
I feel like maybe the matches should be a bit closer together and higher in the picture, as they were in the original. However, your version emphasizes the negative space more, which is a good contrast to the warmth of the matches. Also I can see how it would have been hard to crop it so that there is less space on the top.
Lighting: The smoke seems to overtake the matches just a little - maybe less light on the smoke would have helped this. But I don't feel that this detracted from your overall image.
Camera Work: As others have said, the left match is out of focus. Other than that, everything's amazing. I loved looking at the pictures of your setup and I am in awe at the time and effort you put into this.
Post Processing: You definitely got what you were going for. The blue-colored smoke definitely reminds us of the original while the black background provides perfect contrast.
Image Dimensions and Filesize: Filesize could have been a bit bigger but I don't notice anything where this is a problem.
Misc / My subjective thoughts: This is a very detail-oriented photo - one thing I noticed was the border. While in the same style as the original, the different color adds to the relative warmth of your photo.
I have to say, you did an amazing job. I think the strength of this image is in the emotional pull - the "heroic symbolism" you were going for is definitely what you got.
I hope this helps! Feel free to PM me if you have any questions.
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