Playing with ideas (and some lighting)

[DarrenSA]

This was just one of the far too many ideas I had, and being that it was the simplest to setup I decided to give it a quick go. I used just a normal household light with gladwrap to diffuse the light. This helped make a slight gradient on the background - which is actually just a table tennis board.

I opened some windows for some natural lighting on the subject. I think it came out OK, but still feel I could do better with regards to lighting etc. Afterwards I found a technique with bouncing the on camera flash so I will defiantly try that in the future! Please let me know where I could have improved!

[Jim G]

I like the idea - interesting shot, you've pulled it off well

[tonydee]

Great fun! The colours look a bit muted - I'm not sure how you might have improved it at the time, but you can probably find some post-processing adjustments to give it a crisper feel. If I were you I'd just experiment a bit with white balance and see if any adjustment happened to look better to you. Taking a step back from the lighting/colour question, I think compositionally it lacks sufficient sense of depth: the small blur on the newspaper brings the eye forward to the leg, but there's no sense of focus retreating afterwards... nothing still visible that's fading out of focus. Maybe shooting a bit more down onto the top of the box would allow you to have the far side visible but unfocused, and create that 3 dimensionality.

Always delighted to see these more creative shots, as I tend to do the obvious things in the local temples and gardens, and it's less cerebral ( than your be-sneakered leg in a box of newspaper ). Thanks for sharing, Tony

[DarrenSA]

Thanks for the in depth critique tony, really do appreciate it. I completely agree with you with regards to composition, I would have liked to actually get the entire box in the shot too. The only problem is I would have then got the floor in (shiny creme tiles) which I really did not want in the shot.

I actually did some post processing on the picture, but could probably do more to bring out the colours. When I compare the raw file in photoshop and the resized JPEG posted here, the colours have somewhat dulled down. Any way to stop this?

Thank you again for the comment, I'll use your advice with my future ideas!

[tonydee]

Was thinking maybe 10 or 20 degrees above the plane of the top of the box, so that the background could still be the table top, and the image composition still similar - hopefully a subtle enough change of angle to avoid the dreaded creme tiles .

I'm afraid I don't use Photoshop these days (using Gimp and Lightzone on Linux), so no idea what's happening with the RAW to JPEG conversion for you.

Will be keeping an eye out for your future posts. Cheers.

[DarrenSA]

Sorry to bring up an old threat but just a quick update, I found out why the colours on all my photographs looked muted when viewed online with firefox etc a while back. I was using the "save as" method in photoshop rather than the save for web, so the colourprofile wasn't being imbedded (?). Heres the difference with the colours on the above photograph - quite a difference.