Monday, September 14, 2009

Day 257 of 365


Day 257 of 365, originally uploaded by Rob Weiher.

Was looking around for something to work with this evening and found some chard in the refrigerator. The stem and veins got me to thinking about shooting it like I did the sweet potatoes yesterday.

Using my 70-300mm macro lens, which I used yesterday as well, I put the black fabric on the floor and my tripod fully extended above it. Thankfully the tripod extends out to almost 7 feet so I had to stand on a chair to look through the viewfinder. I took several shots at different shutter speeds and aperture to try and get the best highlight and shadow details. This my shot of the day is the best shot but I wanted to see if I could make it more like I was envisioning.

This next shot is a composition of two shots.



My photo of the day is the base and another much darker version seen below was layered over to help bring in some detail.


Using Photoshop I had my photo of the day as the background image. I pulled the darker image over so it was layer 1. I used the overlay blend mode with layer 1 and then did two separate level adjustments. The first (3rd layer) was to lighten a little and the second (4th layer) was to darken. I did it this way because I used a mask on the 4th layer. With the mask I inverted it (ctrl+backspace) and painted back in some of the dark at a low opacity. Below is a screenshot of my layers panel.

5 comments:

Katy Swift said...

It's really interesting to see all the different variations on a theme. It certainly gives me some ideas.

Mark said...

another nice composition ... I like the dark mood.......

Suselek said...

I love the image, but I thought you want to put not edited pictures on your blog? ;)

Anonymous said...

Well, your hard work paid off- you produced an amazing image. Very cool.

Mr. Salad Bowl said...

Thanks everyone.

Suselek...my goal was to only post unedited shots but at the halfway point I mentioned that I would still post unedited as my daily but on occasion post an edited version as well for those that may be curious about how I would do some post processing work. :)