This was a camera that I picked up as a souvenier while in Hong Kong in March. When this challenge was announced I didn't have a clue what to take a photo of. I had totally forgotten about this camera even though it sits upon my desk. So I didn't plan on entering this challenge because I didn't figure that a photo of a 30D or 40D or even my little point and shoot was going to cut it. Then as I sat at my desk today I saw this camera and pulled my head out of my lower orifice.
I wanted to shoot it with the reflection so I had to go buy a mirror to put it on. Then I realized that the reflection would also include a reflection of the wall or the ceiling or something else and that isn't what I wanted. So I put the black background in my eBay light tent and turned it upside down. Then I turned off many of the surrounding lights so that it woudn't brighten the black because it is pretty lightweight material.
Now is where the fun began, I wanted to have the camera in focus and the reflection slightly out of focus. To achieve this depth of feild would have required a long shutter speed so I wanted to reduce that. Instead I took multiple images of the camera using software on my laptop that I attached to the camera. After 6 shots I used CombinZM to focus stack the images and make this image of the camera.
Then I put it in CS3 and used a levels adjustment layer set to screen to brighten the areas I wanted brighter. I repeated this again and focused on less areas. Then I used when and darkened the black background. I followed this by one set to softlight for a bit more contrast. Then I used a hue/saturation layer to remove some red that is on the camera. I desaturated the entire image to do this. I cropped the image to rotate it a bit and get it to the right side of the frame. I then sharpened, resized, added the border and saved for web.
I am sure this isn't the most creative image in the bunch and if I can pull off a 5.3 I think that will be a good thing.
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