And so, without further ado, on to the actual photo! As I implied, this photo was a commission by a group that will remain unnamed, which I just delivered as a final product this week. The requirements were a vertical composition, 8” x 12” image area, and it had to match the largely monotone theme of a preexisting room. A lot of thought went into this photograph – I waited until the evening sun was shining onto the subject at a low angle and with a warm, orange glow, and I positioned the bottle and myself in such a way as to capture the light as side/diagonal back light. I also placed the glass ever so slightly nearer to the camera than the bottle so as to allow light passing through the bottle to hit the glass at a nice side angle. I actually LOVE how this photo turned out in color, as the deep warm colors of sunset are clearly evident, as is the deep red color of the wine as the light passes through the bottle. It really is a beautiful composition of light and color.
I shot this photograph, like all my photos, in Camera RAW mode. This is a mode of saving photographs that records every piece of data about a photo, rather than just what it sees. This allows for much greater post-processing capabilities without degrading the image, and also allowed me to see the images in black and white in the camera, while still recording the color information in the image file. The down side is that this uses upward of 4 times as much memory as a non-RAW mode photograph, but I personally feel that the sacrifice in quantity of photos is more than worth the gained post-processing capabilities. When I post-processed this image, I actually started with the color image and desaturated it very methodically so as to bring out the hues I wanted and mute the ones I didn’t. Strictly speaking, this photo is not perfectly black and white, but the very slight hues still present were chosen to emphasize important elements in the photo and to match the room in which it is going to be hung.
Overall, I had a great time with this photo, and matching the requirements was actually very fun to do, and gave a sense of direction on where I wanted to go with the photo. Have a great week!
R
Hello!
ReplyDeleteSo, this may make no sense, but for a title I thought: Lust.
Here's my thought process:
"seven deadly sins, wine is an aphrodisiac, so why not lust, or perhaps the Latin word for lust... nah, lust will do fine."
At first I was trying to think of titles that matched perfectly with the photo, like, you know, the obvious ones... but they didn't seem worthy.
And I understand that, depending on your client, it may not be an appropriate title, but that's my input.
Best of luck!
I'm glad to see you are still picking up your camera every once in a while!
-Erica
Thanks for the suggestion! I'm not too sure about that exact title because, as you said, that doesn't really work with the client's theme, but your suggestion gave me a whole new spin on it, and now I have some ideas flowing!
ReplyDeleteYeah, I try to get out and shoot every so often, but it's really hard to find time sometimes. That's why I started this "Photo Friday" series thing - so that even if I can't get out and take photos, I can at least discuss an older photo and recognize the elements of that photo to keep my skills somewhat in practice. It's not nearly as good as actually taking photos, but it's better than nothing.