No, you are not missing week 5; I am just flipping week 6
and week 5. Week 5 is supposed to be a
black and white landscape, however due to the snowstorm last week it is still
difficult to get to places. I know what you are thinking, it has been a week
and they have not cleaned up all the snow.
This is DC most people on side streets were not able to leave their
houses until the Wednesday after the storm, which was on Saturday. Several of the roads here still only have one
lane plowed out. It is just not
pretty. So I flipped-flopped weeks, and
did the artistic challenge.
The artistic challenge was candy. Thus, I went to the candy store and bought
some random little candies. I thought it would be appropriate to use the little
candy hearts since we are getting close to Valentine’s Day. I could not find
the little cinnamon hearts that I wanted so mini-mints were going to have to
work instead. I also bought a stick of
rock candy to experiment with.
The set up for this shoot was extremely simple; I placed a
black board down on my dining room table then placed a white sheet of paper on
top of that. I then dumped the candies
on the paper and arranged them slightly while still keeping them random
looking. I then off to the side I placed a flash pointed down at the
candies. I placed a 60mm macro lens on
my camera and shot at ISO 100 at aperture F8, and a shutter speed of 1/200. Note, I hand held my camera for all the shots. As you can see from the original photo,
it was a little dark and not very vibrant.
I pulled the photo into Lightroom to edit. I color balanced the image,
brightened it up, and increased the contrast.
I then bumped the clarity up to +33, the vibrancy up to +36 and the
saturation up to +7 to make the colors pop.
I also refined the edges and added a little smoothing to the image. Finally, I cropped the image to make one of
the candies the main focal point of the image.
Usually, I am not very good at still life photography but the picture I
think came out ok.
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| Original Image |
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| Final Image |
I also played around with the rock candy a bit. I found that
placing the rock candy directly on the flash creates some interesting light in
the sugar crystals. If you plan to try this for yourself, beware if your
flashes start getting hot, the candy might melt to them. For
this particular image, I was holding the rock candy slightly above the flash. I shot this picture using the same settings as
before. As you can see from the original image it, came out a bit dark so to
pull out the crystal structure I lighted it up a bit and increased the contrast
in Lightroom. Then to make the color and edges pop I increased the clarity to
+43, the vibrancy to +12 and the saturation to +10. I then cropped the image to isolate some of
the sugar crystals. This is a very
abstract image.
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| Original Image |
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| Final Image |
This challenge was good practice for me in
thinking in the abstract. I usually have difficulties doing still life and
random object photos. I believe the
artistic challenges are what are going to push me throughout these 52 weeks to
think outside the box and more creatively. You can see all the final images from this weeks shoot here: http://www.munchkinphotos.com/Other/Practice-Experiments/Candy/
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