I'll be impressed if anyone guesses what this is. It's a desk lamp I bought a few years ago because I liked the spiral shape. We actually ended up getting some curtain rods that are a very similar style.
I shot this in my home made soft box, but didn't actually use the soft box features. I tried many different objects in the soft box, but was not getting anything I liked. I eventually discovered that the soft light wasn't dramatic enough for creating a "puzzle." So for this shot, I turned off all of the ambient lighting, and just used my flash with a blue gel and a sheet for diffusion. This gave not only dramatic light on the object, but the background spill on a white sheet turned out to be a nice color. If I had another flash, I would have used it to light the background with the different gel color.
I used a 13mm extension tube to get the macro-ness of this shot. The small depth of field was tough to work with, but with a f/22 aperture this had just enough depth of field. I really need a Macro rail to increase the focus field.
Looking at the past entries for Puzzle Macro challenges, I expect this to do a little higher than mid range.
Post Processing:
* Straighten
* Retouch some dust out and an abnormality in the paint
* White balance
* Increase Exposure and Brightness
* Topaz DeNoise
* Topaz Adjust
* Crop
* Increase brightness further
* Increase definition and decrease saturation on the metal parts
* S curve
* Export to TIFF
* Resize to 800px
* Sharpen Edges
* Save as JPEG
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