45/365 - the ring

45/365 - the ring... it floats
Originally uploaded by ddiemont

Its a special Valentine's Day post in my blog!!!

Today's photo, in theory, didn't seem so difficult.  About 2 hours of shooting later I discovered that I was being much more ambitious with my photo than even I could have anticipated.

Before we get into the setup of the photo, just a little information on the subject of the picture.  I was engaged a few years ago and luckily I called the whole thing off a few months before the wedding...  We weren't spiritually compatible, and it was going to be a rough go of it had we gone through with it...  and over time i've come to realize that the differences were more than spiritual...  so there's that.  But, on the bright side...  I did my ring back!  And I have always liked this ring... I like the symmetry of it.

*** the shoot ***

the original idea was to have the ring falling and to capture a picture of it in mid-fall.  challenging, but I thought it was doable...  I took about 170 pics of this, with varying levels of success... Regardless of the settings that I made within the camera I wasn't able to get a clear picture of ring at the right angle.

So, onto the backup plan.

to recreate you will need:

• a ghetto lightbox
  
• some pink tissue paper
  
• something to cover the sides of your ghetto lightbox (i used a towel for maximum ghetto-ness)
  
• a ring (you're gonna have to get your own... unless you are female, single, and play your cards right)
  
• some string to magically suspend your ring in mid-air
  
• a candle to light your ring with (and if you are lucky, not catch the tissue paper on fire with)
  
• a tripod
• a camera (unless you are a fantastic painter)

Once you have tied the string to your ring and taped it to the top of your lightbox to suspend it in mid-air, set your camera up to a long exposure (cause it's dark in there) and then light your candle underneath the ring to light it up.  now take some pics.  i used a long lens so i could get some distance from the ring (250mm) and the shutter speed that i used was 1 second.  Also bumped the ISO down to 100 to allow for the longer exposure...  and the aperture is set to f/5.6

once i got the photo into aperture, I took the saturation down a notch (the hot pink was a little too hot), vignetted (as always), and adjusted the levels on the photo so as to get the proper mood.

so there ya go...

happy valentine's day

-derrick

 See - i told you it was a ghetto lightbox ;-)