Day 44

I am reading Bryan Peterson's book "Understanding Close-up Photography" and played around with bubbles today. This was my favorite.

Day 43

I got a bunch of these baby calla lilies yesterday to photograph. I put them in the light-box I made yesterday and played around with the lights until I got what I wanted.
Just when you think you understand lights..... it all goes wrong. I started out with a white background then decided it needed some more contrast so I changed the back sheet to black.

Day 42

I built myself a lightbox today and this is my first attempt. I got tired of fiddling around with 3 speedlights so gave up for now. Will have to work on this ligtbox setup some more.

Day 41

I started out by placing an egg in this blue fabric, then remembered I bought a cool looking pear yesterday. The pear reminded me of a woman's body. After many attempts to light this with the umbrella I realized what I really wanted was a lot of shadows so the shape of the pear and the wrinkles in the fabric would show up better. I put a napkin over the flash and pointed it low and camera left to accentuate the curves. I added a light texture to bring the pear and fabric together and here's the result.

Day 40

At my camera club meeting last night Ron Landis (website http://www.ronlandisphotography.com/gallery/index.html) gave a presentation on HDRI... High Dynamic Range Imaging. I've tried doing hdr before, and thought I'd give it a try again today for my 40th photo. This area of the house is usually very difficult to photograph due to all the windows and skylights. I bracketed 5 shots with 1 stop difference on each photo. I brought the photos into Photomatix. Then worked on it in photoshop quite a bit, I had a hard time getting the colors right.

Day 39

I tried doing the multiples technique again. This time with "Dude" who fortunately has sit and stay down pat. I was able to do it this time without instructions, and tried to do some overlapping to challenge myself a little.

Day 38

I tried back lighting some fruit again today to no avail , took some photos of Dude, nothing special, and a few other things but didn't find anything I liked. A photograph of a mask I bought in Africa a couple years ago, which is about 6 inches wide and 4 feet tall, looked boring too. So I started to play around with it in photo-shop. I cropped the mask down to about 1/2 the height , applied a crystal ball action to it, cut that in 1/2, copied it, flipped it horizontally, doubled the canvas size and pasted it on so both sides were the same. I added some ink spots for eyeball with some texture just for the eyes. I added 2 other textures to the rest of the photo. It looks a little freaky but I like it.