The plant is held up by a metal rod that goes through a hole in the poster board and into a small crevice in my window, which is directly behind everything. Before I attached the plant I shaped the dirt into a ball from it's original square shape created from the plastic pot it came in. I cut off the larger roots and jammed the double helix into the dirt.
The double helix is created from stems of a fake plant that I twisted into shape and is held together by needles that I attached to make the connecting bars of the strand. At first I wanted to make the DNA strand longer and more obvious but that would have made the plant smaller in the composition in order to keep the height at 640 pixels. Not wanting to lose that detail I went with this instead, which I think shows it clearly as a DNA strand.
I had some trouble getting the plant to stay on the rod as it kept wanting to spin upside down. After several attempts it finally stood and I was able to get off a few shots before it would fall again.
Lighting consists of a main light on the left a backlight on the right and one to light the background.
Post Process:
- Raw conversion. Blown highlights recovered from overexposure.
- Cloned out the pole holding the plant up as well as the edge of the lightbox in the lower
left corner and the edges of the double helix to clean things up.
- Noise ninja applied to just the background to remove noise.
- Lucis Arts filter (exposure) applied at a very low setting giving the image more contrast.
- Shadow/Highlights applied just to the highlights to tweak it's contrast.
- Dodged the midtones of the plant and dirt.
- Curves applied to the background to give it a darker color and some burning to fine tune it.
- Curves used to adjust color tone.
- Color Balance used on just the leaves to bring back some green.
- Pixel blending (soft light) to produce more contrast set at a low opacity setting and then blurred to blend in more.
- Color replace tool used for spot color correction.
- Dodged leaves a little.
- Resized using bicubic sharper.
- Save for web.
*Post*
Sweet! I figured this might do well since it's very stock photo-ish and I went for perhaps the most obvious acronym but once I heard some of the players who entered this challenge I didn't expect a blue would be in the works. Thanks everyone!
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Excellent Concept. Really like the choice of background color, what did you use for it? The DNA strang and ball of dirt. Most clever! The plant also works nicely as well. Congratulations on the blue :)
Congratulations Yanko. A very worthy ribbon and an absolutely ingenious idea. Can't for the life of me figure out how your mind saw this befor you shot it.
Great job!
It is a great capture with those tap roots making the double helix. I love the earthy natural tones. The only thing I don't like is that the plant is floating. I would like it to have something to rest on. Great idea and lighting.
I love this photo, I think its incredibly well put together, and deserving of publication as a cover of a plant genetics book. My only suggestion would have been to use a pea plant to link this to Mendel.
Ooh...that's really cool. I love how the roots make a strand of DNA, and the plant seems like it's floating. Also nice use of colo choice for the background. I think any other color might have taken away from the image. I'm guessing this one will ribbon...clever idea. 10
If this isn't Yanko's, you can mail me that dirt ball & I'll eat it. Nicely done - lighting, composition colors, everything. Possibly initialism but I'm not the uptight sort (especially since I just learned there was such a thing as "initialism" when reading the acro thread!). Well done & my guess is that it's the blue. 9
That is awesome with the helix as the roots. VERY clever. Love the suspension of it. Something scalvert would do. Even the centering of the rootball works. Good job. Perfect focus and lighting.
DNA
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