Our friend from Denmark had a student tour of NYC and she managed to escape from the madness to visit my Mom and sister. So I went yesterday to see them all. Also had to sing at the 100th anniversary of the family church in the morning. We had a very nice visit. She went back to NYC and I am home.
Now about 11:00 PM last night, I was thinking what to shoot for this challenge and said, hmmmm. I had shot the same decanter against blinds during the day at Mom's using the mini blinds in the dining room. Came out nice but I never liked the color. I did 'Stem Distortions' there around the same time, like Feb/Mar of '05.
I used a tungsten white balance in sunlight and got the blue coloring on 'Stem Distortions'. But I had always wanted to try to get the gold color you get from shooting with the white balance on sunlight against incandescent light. I had tried this on a subsequent visit or two Mom's and it just did not work out the way I wanted. So I said OK...do it. But....
There was a party across the street and it went on forever and people were coming and going and being loud and it just pissed me off til about 02:00 AM or so. I said it just has to get done and I gave up worrying what they might think if they saw me in the enclosed front porch taking a picture.
Mom has a lamp by the front living room window on a timer and the timer was about to go off. So I searched for a glass and then saw the decanter and said...YES! I put a small side table from the porch in front of the window and then set up a wicker footstool on its side on top of it. The combination of the two was high enough to have the decanter up to the blinds. I covered the footstool with a black sweatshirt I had with me and placed the decanter on top of it. I had the camera on my travel tripod and used the manual remote. I mananaged to get off 15 (well really 14.5, the exif is not complete on the last picture cause the lamp turned off while it was still writing the long exposure to the CF card and I turned the camera off before it completed....oy!) shots and came home and picked and processed this version.
Post: Convert from raw with a +0.33 exposure compensation. Crop. Cloned out some bright red hot spots on the decanter and some defects on the decanter neck and a small area of ill defined reflection. Layer adjustments for levels, brightness/contrast and hue/saturation. Merge. A layer of curves to brighten a bit. Cloned out some additional small aberrations on the blinds. I was going to use NeatImage but it could not find a place to work from on the image and I decided to let it go. Sharpen. Resize. Sharpen.
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Better Photo, 2nd Place, Elements of Design, October, 2006 Contest
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