Jan 17
How I did it-A Christmas Sail
Posted: under Wheeler Images.
Tags: boat, photography, sailboat, water, Wheeler Images
I was feeling a little desperate coming up to Christmas. We needed to get our Christmas cards out soon and in my semi-obsessive, back-asswards kind of way I was bound and determined to have my 2nd year with a sailing-themed photograph. Couldn’t I just find a Christmas card with a sailboat on it? No, I wanted to do my own thing…
And this is what I came up with.
To get the lighting right, I used a tripod. I wanted to use the soft illumination that came from the tree, and hid some of the tree lights behind the sail so it would be nicely backlit, but that meant that the front of ornament would be not be as well lit. So I took some prelit garland that used that same type of lights as the tree and plugged it in. During the long exposure I directed (as best I could) the light from the garland to the hull of the ornament. I got this idea from photographers who “paint with light”.
I also merged together multiple exposures. By “multiple” I mean two or three…I’m not high tech HDR girl, but I’ve come to appreciate what can be done when you can pick from the best elements of differently exposed photographs. I was able to have brighter lights and more intense colors.
It’s really pretty amazing what we have to do with cameras and computers to recreate what our eyes do naturally. I may touch on this in another post that talks about white balance.
Final touches included minimizing the impact of the electric cords, straightening the boat so it was level, and other small tweaky things.
The water effect was done with the help of the “Flood” filter from Flaming Pear. Once I had the “Hey, put the boat in water” epiphany, that actually was pretty easy.
Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.
