Adjusted hues and saturation level after importing from Nikon RAW. Cropped, framed and sharpened.
**** POST CHALLENGE ****
Thanks for the blue everyone, even to those who voted 4 and below ;-)
It's late so I'll write up a how I did it tomorrow.
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So my original idea was to have a red heart shaped smoke ring. My hope was to find some red smoke from a magic shop, but even though it was close to halloween, I wasn't able to. I ended up just getting incense, and would go with standard smoke color.
So the next trick was, how would I create heart shaped rings? After brainstorming with my son and his friend over lunch, we decided having a heart shaped cutout put over the end of a paper towel roll may result in what I wanted. As I was creating my roll, I realized I needed to cap the other end to trap the smoke so when I squeezed it to create the puff/ring, it wouldn't escape out the back. So with my heart cutout cap on one end and the other end capped off, I proceeded to setup the statue.
I setup my black backdrop and then had the statue on a table. In front of the table I had my speedlight set on the floor shooting straight up. I ended up putting a cardboard shield up against the table to keep the flash from directly hitting the statue. The light you see is indirect, and bounced off the ceiling.
Originally I had the statue facing the other direction, but with some natural air current, even without the air conditioning on, and all windows closed, I was having trouble getting the smoke to trail correctly. So we decided to face it the other way. My girl friend had the tube with smoke off screen to the left behind the statue and would puff a ring. As soon as it would get in position past the table and into the light of the speedlight I would remote trigger the flash. As you can see, even with a heart cutout, the ring was a circle :-(
It took several hundred near hits to get this one. I'd like to thank Yessica and her patience for pushing me to keep shooting until we got it right!
Statistics
Place: 1 out of 105 Avg (all users): 7.0729 Avg (commenters): 8.3704 Avg (participants): 6.6047 Avg (non-participants): 7.1716 Views since voting: 9290 Views during voting: 585 Votes: 247 Comments: 71 Favorites: 22 (view)
Most excellent execution. This was one of my faves from this challenge. Congrats on the blue :)
Thanks for the setup details. Always appreciated and interesting to read.
congrats on a well thought-out and executed shot... and the blue of course... and the other prize :)
ETA: I am so glad your red heart idea did not pan out. It would've been rather tacky, but with the ring it is perfect. Actually, this smoke ring reminds me a ribbon without flaps... coincidence? :)
Proficiat! This was the winner in my book too and I voted a 10 ( I only gave two 10's by the way) The only 9 that I gave went to the 2nd placed red ribbon winner.
This is brilliant! Love everything about this, especially the lighting. The tiny sliver of light in the eye just gives it the perfect touch. Congratulations on your blue AND on winning the duel ;-)
This is really unusual and looks awesome. The smoke ring is perfect and the blue tone is really good, only thing that bugs me is the visible brown sleeve(?) on the wrist.
excellent! i know the sculpture adds a lot to the uniqueness of this photography but your excellent lighting work makes the shot. the circular smoke is a perfect touch. should place high. good luck.
Congratulations on the fantastic picture and getting the smoke ring in the right place! The only little flaw is that the lighting is on the sculpture an not on the smoke, but that's really being needlessly picky.
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