I have no explanation for this New Year's Eve project. SO not my style!!! It was still early in the evening. I was sober. I was experimenting ... hmmm, well, maybe that's where it went wrong ...
My get pushed challenge this week from Mandy R was "to do a shot thinking of composition where your main subject is in the background with the foreground blurred to show depth." Did she mean depth of depravity???
So the concept percolated in my brain all week. I intended to just photograph Francoise's wine bottle with a couple glasses stretched out in front of it to give the photo depth. I caught some black velvet on sale for 60% off, nice long 4 yard piece for about $20 (score!!), set it up on the dining room table with a tall plant stand behind it to hold it up, and added the wine bottle and glass. Then I had just run across my crystal ball and was thinking about Northy's broken glass shot and wanted to see if I could replicate her lighting (fail!), THEN thought about this Creative B&W online class that I've signed up for that discussed surprises in the shots, so I pulled out the one gnome and set him up in front of the crystal ball. Then the Elf on the Shelf came to my mind. Then the shot looked unbalanced, so I got the other gnome. Then I had dead space in the middle ... and had to come up with a way to light that glass flower I put there.
So I combined a couple pics in PS to mask out the flashlight, which entailed some of the light sculpting skills I've sorta learned this fall. Then added a texture according to what I learned over the summer and per the B&W assignment. For the record, the wine bottle and glass are in focus, but the texture masks that fact a bit.
And voila. This is what I came up with. I have a feeling this is not quite what Mandy had in mind... :-)
I loved the entire story, and I think the tilt to the picture adds so much. Oh, we drank the bottle you left with us last summer on Christmas eve after I opened it to cook garlic chicken for a special dinner! (riesling was it? delicious it was)
(Francoise - the wine is delicious! Thank you!)
(Northy - I really do want to know how you lit that broken glass!)
my broken glass was sitting on the iPad, using a photo lighting app called softbox pro...