There was raining, hailing, snowing and windblowing today. So I had to do something inside the house with stuff I found there.
These two horse figures are from Rattvik in the Dalarna region of Sweden. Very common tourist products. Most people have machined items from the factories you can visit.
These two however, are entirely handmade (cut and painted) by John Gudmunds. John Gudmunds has (he did when I was last there, almost 8 years ago) a small gallery at his house. His work is much better than the factory stuff.
Dalarna is a great area to visit and I intend to go there in the summer of 2004.
Setup: Horses are 40cm apart, background is A2 white photo paper. Lightsources: three overhead, one from the right, plus several reflectors. The end result isn't perfect though.
Photoshop:
* manual levels
* manual curves
* crop
* Dodged the shadows of the red horse
* Dodged part of the background
* cloned out the shadows under the blue horse
* FM digital velvia +2 (improves saturation)
* Resampled
* Unsharp Mask, but only the in focus horse
* Gaussian Blur, but only on the white background (to get the last noise out of the whites so that I could get the jpeg compression one level higher without exceeding 150kb)
* Save for the web
Statistics
Place: 92 out of 174 Avg (all users): 5.4134 Avg (commenters): 6.9000 Avg (participants): 5.3364 Avg (non-participants): 5.5278 Views since voting: 1449 Votes: 179 Comments: 12 Favorites: 0
It has been a long time since I have seen one of these beautifully crafted horses. The red and blue horses are beautiful but I wonder if the stark white background was a good choice - I think in this shot at least it tends to wash out the rich colors. Perhaps a black background would be better to make those colors 'pop' out from a darker contrast. Plus it would draw the eye ever more to those colors.
Beautiful vibrant colors in the foregroung horse really makes it pop out of the background. Love the lighting on this shot. You were able to get some great shadow on the front of the horse. I like the closeup of the hand painted decorations on the subject. Excellent DOF. "10"
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.
