Still house bound by surgery and a sky-load of heavy rain I just
had to have some photo fun. So I took out the new ultra-wide zoom (Canon EF-S 10-22) and looked for something that would test its metal as well as my ability to take advantage of it. Not surprisingly that brought me back to my music room.
Following some time with camera in hand and a short Photoshop session this is what I created...
For anyone who might be interested this is how the image was created...
The photo was shot at 10mm (16mm equivalent in 35mm format), hand held, in rather dim room light. The front of the lens was mere inches from the closest guitar.
I stopped down and focused mid-field to increase the depth of field enough to keep the "Les Paul Custom" writing on the foremost guitar reasonably sharp. Aperture was f/11, shutter speed was about 1/8 second.
Ideally a shot like this should have plenty of carefully controlled light. But since was shot using available light I had to use Photoshop to create the effect.
First off I created the lens flare. The EF-S has remarkably little even under bright lighting. With flat room light such as this it had
none. So I created it (thanks Photoshop!), placing it just where I wanted it to draw the viewer's eye.
Next came the addition of a little dramatic lighting effect, shaped so that that lens flare made sense. This was done using Photoshop lighting effects ("spot") with carefully chosen parameters.
That, however, created a new problem: The "spot" effect washed out all the details on the Stratocaster's (Guitar #2) white pickguard and pickups, so I went back and copied those details, redid the spot effect, and then burned the details back in via the creation of a 2nd layer (later merged).
Finally I did just a
bit of cropping and perspective adjustment, saved the image as a jpeg, and I was done.
Here, btw, is the original straight from the camera:
This was a fun experiment with the new lens. Now to get out of the freakin' house and start actually living again!
-don
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