Wow! Creating a still life photo was a lot more difficult and rewarding than I had ever thought. I really like this shot and I'm hoping it will be well received by the voters. I would love to have this shot be my first to break into the 6's. However, I'm predicting that this will be a low to mid 5's as many may feel it's too dark.
Set up (I had only 20mins take the shots):
- Black material (purchased for this challenge) hung between two of my kithen cupboards then draped along the floor.
- Found the chair dumped on the road near my house the day before. My favourite old hat (used in other challenges). Took a while to find the right type of dead branch. An old cystal vase. Hence the title 'Nothing New'.
- I always stuggle a bit with lighting as I don't have anything suitable for studio shots. I used a 500 watt portable workshop light bounced of my kitchen stone splash-back to provide most of the light from the left hand side. A dolphin tourch inside a white pillow case was angled up from the floor to reduce some of the shadows. Finally, a maglight tourch was used from the right hand side to paint the branches. I wanted the dark/shadows effect as that is what I had in mind during the set up. Having looked at it for a few days I feel it may not be that well received but I'm not going to change it as it reflected my mood at the time and is what I wanted.
- Used the camera timer to allow me to paint the branches
Post Processing:
- Raw conversion using Canon Digital Photo Professional. Changed the white balance to 'tungsten'.
- Processed using Photoshop 6 (about as old as the props)
- Cropped.
- Converted to B&W following the 'Methods of Black and White Conversion by [user]fotomann_forever[/user]. I used the Channel Mixer and Duotone steps.
- Adjusted curves
- Sharpened using Unsharpen Mask
- Cloned out hot pixels and a little dust on the cloth
- reduced size to 1600 then USM sharpened again
- reduced size to 800 then USM sharpened again (each time reducing the sharpen effect)
- Saved for Web (not required to reduce image size but was the only way I could work out how to convert back to a JPG)
This was the original shot (converted from raw & resised only):
Statistics
Place: 79 out of 151 Avg (all users): 5.3846 Avg (commenters): 6.6250 Avg (participants): 5.2295 Avg (non-participants): 5.5536 Views since voting: 684 Views during voting: 239 Votes: 117 Comments: 9 Favorites: 0
not really sure what it is with this, but I'll try to put it into words...to me either the lighting is harsh or your USM is over done and finally...this is not a B&W (not that I'm taking off for that...just saying)
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