A somewhat abstract shot

[Anonymous]

Here's one I just took and reworked tonight.

I'm swiping Len's frame and name style. :wink:

(I really love Photoshop. The thumbnail is the original image.)

 

[Len]

Gorgeous abstract. Good compositional crop! Perhaps a bit more DOF would serve the textures better, but it's beautiful as is. Nice framing to boot :lol:

 

[reefNewbie]

i dont get how you were able to zoom in so close like that if the original was from further away

 

[Anonymous]

Gorgeous abstract. Good compositional crop! Perhaps a bit more DOF would serve the textures better, but it's beautiful as is. Nice framing to boot :lol:

Thanks. Glad you like the framing. ;-)

I halfheartedly agree about the DOF. I would have liked to have seen a bit more on that foreground area, but then again I think as it is now it really pushes the eye into that center opening. Might be worth a re-shoot sometime to see if I could get a different angle.

 

[Anonymous]

i dont get how you were able to zoom in so close like that if the original was from further away

5.0 megapixel original image. Plus with the macro mode my camera has, I can go waaaay in and still get detail. On the viewscreen on my camera I have the option to double the size of the image so that I can manually focus to very fine detail. I'm still getting the hang of it, but I'm getting better. That image was the best of about 15 or 20 I shot.

 

[reefNewbie]

so you zoomed in with digital zoom, or that was photoshoped zoom?

 

[Anonymous]

so you zoomed in with digital zoom, or that was photoshoped zoom?

Neither, that image I have that's the original is just a thumbnail. If I posted the full-size image it'd be like 8 or 9 meg and measure about 16" x 20" or so. Even that cropped and completed image would print to about 9" x 11" or so full-size.


There's actually a good tip in there...

1. Shoot at the highest resolution your camera will allow.
2. Shoot a very large frame...you can always crop.

 

[Anonymous]

FWIW, details of that shot...

I set a large floodlamp up above the sand dollar and to camera-right, about 10" above the tabletop. The sand dollar is resting on a charcoal grey fleece blanket. I used a white-bounce (actually a piece of white notebook paper on a clipboard) to the camera-left of the sand dollar, just barely out of the camera's frame. While looking through the viewfinder I angled the bounce around until I felt I was getting enough light back into the shadowed areas, then shot a bracket of 3 shots (my camera can auto-bracket) at normal exposure and +1 and -1 f-stops.

Stage 2 was post-work in Photoshop. I took the original image, converted to b&w (which didn't change it much, but did remove the last vestiges of color), then cropped it down, adjusted the brightness and contrast, then converted to a grey-scale version of sepia-toning.

Sounds complicated, but it really was just a matter of playing around with things until I got it the way I wanted it.

-John