113/365 - beer and wings

113/365 - beer and wings
Originally uploaded by ddiemont

for those who haven't followed my antics, I'm a HUGE Red Wings Fan (actually, I'm a huge Detroit Sports Fan)... so tonight was the Detroit Red Wings 4th game of the playoffs and since I was headed out to have some drink while watching the game decided to take a shot of some "Wings and Beer" (obviously a play on buffalo wings and beer... yum).

So, first things first, take shots... i poured a glass of beer and got several shots of it in various states of beer headedness... for this shot i used one with no foam for the base layer and second shot take a few seconds earlier with a thin coating of head on the beer...

Now, open both those shots in photoshop and place the no foam version at the bottom layer... then i went online and found a red wings logo and imported that into the composition in it's own layer...

so, at this point i have 3 layers

- red wings logo on top
- beer with a lot of foam on the layer below that
- beer with little foam on the bottom later

ok, now select the logo and use the distortion feature (in photoshop it is under "Edit > Transform > Distort" to distort the perspective of the logo such that it appears as though it is laying atop the beer.

ok, now we've got the elements laid out the way we want them, we just want to get rid of that wacky looking logo atop the beer... so with that layer selected we do a color range selection (luckily the red wings logo is only red)... in photoshop it is "Select > Color Range..." this allows us to choose the red portions of the image... which essentially is the red wings logo. when in the color selection tool select the red from the image and adjust the fuzziness such that the logo is highlighted and not much else... then click ok and now you have your selection.

so, now we have the logo selected, it's time to start erasing some beer head... select your second layer and now your selection is going to apply to that layer... next i selected the eraser tool and set the opacity to about 20% and erased the entire logo...

The next thing i did was select the selection tool again and then open the "Refine Edges Dialog" and decreased the size of the selection by contracting it to about -30 or so... then selected the eraser tool, changed the opacity to about 70% and erased some the entire selected area...

saved and re-imported into aperture and added the vignette and did some work with levels (obviously i could have done this in CS3, but i've got a workflow in Aperture that I am MUCH faster with, so that is what I tend to work with for things that i know)...

and that's about it... sounds kind of intensive, but it really only took about 10 minutes to put all the pieces together. just took a bit of planning ahead of time and knowing exactly what i wanted to do ;-)

thanks for stopping by...
4 games down, 12 to go.
-Derrick

107/365 - the colors of spring

108/365 - the colors of spring
Originally uploaded by ddiemont

blah So early yesterday i was contemplating what my shot of the day was going to be... well, i picked up some metal pipes that were laying around my house in thoughts that i could build myself a new ghetto lightbox with them... well, didn't have enough pipe to make the lightbox, but I decided to pick them up and look through them. I can't quite tell you why I did, just an accident I suppose, but as I looked through the pipes I notices that the light refracted through each of the pipes differently when pointed at the same item.

So, now I had my photo idea for the day, I just needed to execute. So I took a couple of rubber bands and strapped the 6 pipes together and went outside to start looking through them for some cool colors. I eventually ended up in front of some Wisteria and found the colors to be perfect. I set the pipes up on the boat in the yard and started shooting (see picture below).

Just in case you are looking to reproduce, the pipes were about 1" in diameter and about 2 feet long. I'm not quite sure what they are from though...

So that's about it. nothing terribly special, just some pretty colors ;-)

Thanks for stopping by
-Derrick

101/365 - the escape plan

101/365 - the escape plan
Originally uploaded by ddiemont

It's been a while and I'm back!!! So today we are going to discuss how to do a ghetto macro lens. Be forewarned... this is crazy... I am a professional driver on a closed course ;-)

This is pretty simple stuff, but a real pain without the proper equipment (which i do not have). Basically what you are going to want to do is to take your camera, mount it on a tripod (for some semblance of steadiness) and then mount your 50mm lens onto the camera backwards... well, that is if you have a reversing ring, for nikon's it is a BR-2A, this is an accessory that will allow you to mount your 50mm lens backwards onto your camera, effectively turning it into a macro lens... I, in this case, just held the lens in front of the camera... truly ghetto.

so there must be a catch right??? otherwise no one would ever buy a macro lens. well, there are several catches... this is a completely manual solution, so a lot of trial and error will be part of your photo shoot. this is because your camera can't meter without a lens attached (and essentially you aren't mounting the lens... even with the Br-2A). So you will have to adjust the iso, shutter speed and aperture manually). there doesn't appear to be a way to adjust the focus when the camera is reverse mounted as well, so you will have to move the camera to adjust for this.

So, what I did for this shot was reversed the 50mm, and then started shooting the dandelion which was taped to a piece of black posterboard... bumped up the iso to 800 to allow for a faster shutter speed and then took about 10 shots with the timer shooting mode so i could get as steady as possible. then brought the shot into aperture and cropped slightly, adjusted the exposure, and then converted to monochrome using the green filter.

that's it... so what did i learn??? i learned it is time to get a real macro lens. i really like getting up close to items and this allows you to do just that. so i think know what my next photo purchase will be ;-)

thanks for stopping by.
-derrick

before flipping the lens:



after flipping the lens: