I came up with about half a dozen good ideas for this challenge, but thinking that I might not survive the current round of the Enzo tournament sapped my motivation and I went with one of the easier concepts.
Last August I bought some 1.2lb test tippet material (ultra thin fishing line) for just such an occasion. It's thinner than a human hair and basically invisible if you keep the light off it. This shot was just a matter of hanging the fork from a chandelier and then finding a good angle. I used a slab of marble as the base for an elegant texture that helps hide the tippet.
Originally, I had a monolight with 20 degree honeycomb overhead to throw sharp shadows and a small softbox on either side for fill light, but the softboxes created frustrating reflections on the marble that made the forks look like they were on glass (ruining the effect), and the honeycomb by itself was too contrasty. I solved that problem by pointing the softboxes at the ceiling.
Processing: Convert from RAW, Crop, Photo Filter for a slightly cooler tone, desaturate the red channel, Curves, USM, Levels, Channel Mixer conversion to B&W, then fade to leave a trace of color.
Statistics
Place: 17 out of 210 Avg (all users): 6.4091 Avg (commenters): 6.8333 Avg (participants): 6.5125 Avg (non-participants): 6.3390 Views since voting: 2098 Views during voting: 312 Votes: 198 Comments: 17 Favorites: 1 (view)
This really should have scored MUCH higher Shannon.
Wondering why this only reached 17th place raises my eye to friends voting.
Are you saying Shannon doesn't have any friends? :P There were a few odd high scores in this one. 6.4 does seem a bit low for this shot especially for basic editing.
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