Same glasses as from my "Alone in a Crowd" entry:
After I entered that, I tried out various additional arrangements with the free study in mind.
The setup was fairly simple. I have three clamp lamps ($5 each at the hardware store: 2 with 100W equivalent compact fluorescent bulbs and one with a 150W equivalent bulb). I pushed my dining room table up against the wall and put the lamps on it, pointing them to my yellow dining room wall so no light came forward toward the glasses. I got the idea from Raziel's excellent description of his Lucky 7 entry.
As for the glasses, that's blue gelatin - a packet or two plus some blue food coloring. Not jello, so it wasn't good to eat, much to my kids' disappointment.
They really are balanced that way - no strings or anything. I stomped gently on the floor to be sure they wouldn't fall over easily, tiptoed back to my camera (which I'd already aimed and focused), quickly hit the shutter and took the glasses down. This was at 1am, and I really didn't want to have to explain to my wife why she woke up to the sound of shattering wine glasses. :)
Unfortunately, I hadn't thought about the result of lighting blue gelatin with yellow light. Not much blue comes off the wall, so the gelatin was very dark, and it appeared green. I couldn't fix that easily in the other entry, but here in advanced editing I used a soft light layer to brighten the gelatin and a color layer to change it back to blue. Whereas I usually use editing to change a color, here I used it to restore the real color.
The rest of the editing was the usual: sharpening, USM for contrast enhancement, and cropping. Oh, and I cloned out some uneven coloring in the wall and a few minor messy spots in the glasses and gelatin.
This picture has been my most winning outside of DPC - 1st place in betterphoto.com's November 2007 contest "Elements of Style" and the Kodak Picture of the Day on Feb. 27, 2008. And it won on trustedreviews.com for Feb '08. Not exactly winning a prize, but a woman on betterphoto tried to copy it (she was even nice enough to tell me about it).
WAAAYYYYY post-challenge: well, whaddayaknow? I used what I learned 8 months later and won a ribbon with another gelatin shot!
Statistics
Place: 20 out of 393 Avg (all users): 6.7647 Avg (commenters): 7.7647 Avg (participants): 6.7182 Avg (non-participants): 6.8837 Views since voting: 6342 Views during voting: 348 Votes: 153 Comments: 35 Favorites: 24 (view)
Sorry it took so long to get around to this, Jeffrey. Another great shot here - although I can only imagine what your wife would have done to you if she saw you setting this up with her good wine glasses. :)
My 8-year old son and I enjoyed this shot. I asked him how he thought it was done and his initial response was that you must have taken the picture very quickly before the liquid settled/ran out...then he quickly retreated because of the difficulty of doing that with the fully inverted upper glass and I challenged him to think of different ways it could be done...he came up with paint, taping or gluing something in the glasses and a couple other pretty good ideas...and he got excited as he got more creative...Oh well, probably more than you need to know! But we did enjoy it and I think this creative shot helped my son better understand that there often are many different ways to achieve a result/solve a problem which was a fun process to witness. Thanks!
Congrats on the top 20! Glad to see these do well for you. Really good job with the lighting and set up, and with the editing. You have a very good eye for very pleasing graphic presentations, and a whole lotta skill in creating a professional, finished look in post processing. (All that said, this reminds me a bit of He Who Will Not Be Named...)
I love the colors and light in this shot -- much more life than the one for Alone in A Crowd. Congratulations for a a beautiful image, an excellent score, and a very impressive placement in a Free Study challenge.
Gelatin appears to be a good thing here at DPC! I will need to remember this.
Nice work and great finish Jeff. The lighting is really good, the composition is interesting, and the graphic feel really draws the viewer in with that "Wow" effect.
So is this frozen blue water, in stacked wine glasses? I've always wondered about the technique that creates this effect. Whatever you did to creat it, you did it well
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