Peekfoto

Wow, Where did September go. Ok I was on vacation for three weeks but still, wouldn't you think I would have time to do a blog post here and there. Oh well, guess that is water under the bridge now.

It's been a little over a month since I shot my son's wedding and the images have been coming slow. I am not sure it I am being to picky or if I am too emotionally attached to the images. Usually I can fly thought image selection but this time it came slow. It has been spaced out a little also. Just last week we shot the rings. It is nice to have the couple local to be able to do that with. So with those all shot it was into Photoshop to get the finished. Here are some of the examples.

 These are all straight forward shots of stacked rings. The on one below with the bible is slightly different ion that both rings make the heart shadow in the gutter of the bible. Interesting though is how the lighting creates relatively the same heart shape while the grooms ring is laying down and the brides is standing up. The shot was taken with tungsten light (the ceiling light in the room overhead) with an EF50 f/1.4 USM at 1/6 seconds at f/11 and 100 ISO. I needed f/11 to get both rings in focus with that 50mm lens and ended up stacking sharpness (-100) adjustment brushes in Lightroom.

I would have used onOnes Focal point but was getting error messages when I went to the plugin from CS5 so I had to improvise. I fixed the memory error by rebooting but didn't want to in the heat of battle so I improvised and liked what I had.

The next image I have receive the most comments from as it seems the brides ring is floating in air.

 This one surprisingly was one of the easiest to edit. It was only three layers in CS5. The image below is where I started. The grooms ring is about eight inches behind the brides. It was shot with the same lens only at 1/100 second at f/4 however the light was constant fluorescent. I positioned the camera to have the stones in the circle of the grooms ring. My first action was to do a rough selection of the rings and put them on their own layer. Next was to fill the Wii controller and rings. Looking back now it would have been easier to just create my own background but the blending of the isolated rings would have been much harder. Finally on the third layer I copied the brides ring, selected and filled to black, compressed it with free transform, and finally ran a gaussian blur on it. When it made the trip back to Lightroom I sharpened, lightened, and boosted the clarity with the localized adjustment brush (I just love that thing).

The last ring shot was somewhat of a progression project. Below is the stating image right out of the camera. It was shot with an EF 24-105 f/4 IS USM at 1/160 second, f/18 and 100 ISO. Shot on a piece of foam-core board and lit with an Alien Bee's Ring flash and way low power.

Isolated and fixed up, the image above was the final until my son said it looked like an advertisement. It was off tho the web to find a Helzberg logo which none were going to work without some serious help. At least not to the size I wanted to use.

I brought a file into CS5 and used the background eraser tool which left the enlarges small jpg file all jagged. Spent some time with the pen tool creating a vector mask which I could much easier scale to my hearts content resulting in the image you see above.

That's going to do it for now, hopefully it will not be November before my nest post.

Take care... Doug