Drive-On

Hey all, I don't have much time this morning but I wanted to get something out today. This is another of the product shots I did last week. It is the inside of a hard drive from one of the computer from years ago. You know those little stickers that say you warranty is void if seal is broken. Well... I guess it is no longer covered. This is a typical single two sided platter. I think this is a 32meg drive ant it was the bomb and the time. Now it would not hold the image that took its picture. Wow!

Take care and come on back tomorrow. Cya... Doug


For more information of our photography, visit us at peekfoto.

Chip Off The Old Blog

Years and years ago I had a computer... actually it was my first laptop. It was a Tandy computer that I purchased in Wichita KS while I was going through aircraft recurrent in a Learjet model 25. Well as computers go, the world passes them buy and life seems to grind to a painful dribble when running programs. The solution has always been, yep... Get a newer, faster, and better computer.

So what do you do with the old boat anchor. Toss it in the trash? No, that hurts too much. 

 

This after all was my first laptop. The tinkerer that I am got the best of me and I had to open the hood and see what was underneath. Besides I had decided to give the carcass to one of my boys to use a he was in his secret squirrel period. The problem was the weight. It would take all he had to lug the thing around. So in the diet, I ended up with the chip shown above. The cover is simple soldered to the top of the chip so that came off really easy to expose the processor. 

So it ended up in the studio for some macro work. What you see above was using a 50mm 1.4 prime with a macro filter screwed onto the front. I will eventually end up with a dedicated macro lens but am waiting for the right time.

From the studio to the CF card, the iMac, over to the MacBook Pro and finally into Lightroom in my hotel room. Onto some artistic renditions of this little jewel. Here is what I came up with.

Yes this was all done in Lightroom using the localized adjustment brush, Color always has a way to better delineate parts of a larger pard. It kind of reminds me of the aircraft engines in college that were cut-away and then the various parts were painted to represent the different aspects of the propulsion process. 

The yellow circle shows the brush tool while the little dots on the image represent each adjustment. It is always fun to play with objects to recreate them in a different light.... Uh, maybe a different color.

Have a good day and tomorrow I thing I will have a hard drive to look at. Ooooo, how exciting. Well it was for me anyhow.

Cya... Doug


For more information of our photography, visit us at peekfoto.

Hofbräuhaus

Last week when my wife was out visiting our grandson, I had some time to just play and explore in the studio. Normally I use the Westcott TD-5 Spiderlites for product photography, but I had the Elinchrom strobes still on the stands so I thought I would give them  go.

I was at the Hofbräuhaus on a trip to Munich Germany quite a number of years ago and picked up a little wall plate for my wife. The Hofbräuhaus was the location in February 1920 when Adolf Hitler mad his proclamation that established the Nazi Party.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Here is the original image of the plate right out of the camera.

That would have been fine but I just couldn't leave it alone. I worked it some in Lightroom and then made the jump to Photoshop to go a little artistic with the plate. The original color of the plate was a little more blue and the metal was pewter. Both of which have faded and slipped some over the years. So here is the rejuvenated version of the Hofbräu plate.

Tomorrow I am going to go with digital art with a CPU chip but fro right now it is off to work.

Cya... Doug


For more information of our photography, visit us at peekfoto.

Getting Started

Hope you all had a good weekend. I am going to spend the next couple of days going over what I shot last week in the studio but here is the start of it. Above is a screen shot of the Lightroom Library module. With the room constraints in the studio I use a couple of sheets of white mat-board for a seamless background.

I have really cut down on my workflow in Lightroom. My first pass eliminates 90% of the final rejects which constitute about 20% of overall portrait an 80% of product. So that means if I take 10 shots of a particular product pose, there will only be two final picks of that pose (sometimes only one). That means that seven of the eight final rejects will happen on the first pass. I'll use the survey mode initially and then switch to the compare mode when it comes down to the wire. This way I can zoom on the final two for comparison.

All five of the plate images were sharp but the last one had the higher exposure and was most workable in the Develop module (AKA Adobe Camera RAW). 

The biggest improvement in my workflow was not getting emotionally attached to the images. This is easier with product shots as it is just an object. Portraiture is a little different, there is an emotional feedback during the shoot that reemerges during post production, so it takes a little more discipline when I work with people shots.

Tomorrow I will go over the editing of a final shot. 
For now, take care... Doug


For more information of our photography, visit us at peekfoto.