WEEK 17 DARK
My Post # 289:
Thanks Ant - I'm sure any week now I will have no ideas at all, and will be posting a large blank canvas...mmmm... now there's an idea!
Jean
To think I imagined a large white blank canvas - I was soooooo close...... to this week's large BLACK canvas
I did seriously wonder if, in the total absence of any ideas at all, I could get away with the ultimate 'Dark' photo.
That's cheating, isn't it?
By Friday night the only idea I'd had was an outline of trees, barely visible in the dark, and had no idea of how to do that.
As in many previous weeks it was Mr JG who came up with the idea - faced with accompanying me into the Forest in the dead of night, armed with a large torch/car headlights, he was getting desperate. We have a couple of large ebony carved heads from Kenya. They're about 24" tall and so heavy I can hardly move them. And they're very dark - black as ebony, in fact. :nuts:
So here is one of them:
I wanted to make this dark-on-dark, with the head lit very subtley against a black background. Lots of searching the house for a black background and I found - a dark green duvet cover! Well, how close is that. :bonk:
The size of this head made my usual (bedside)table top set up impractical, so the living room floor was the only option. But taping the duvet cover to newly painted walls would be a quick route to the divorce courts, so I set up a Heath Robinson 'studio' comprising the duvet cover, a clothes airer, clothes pegs, and the silver sunshield thingy I keep in the car in the unlikely event that I'll need it. Lighting? What lighting, it's DARK, isn't it???? The camera thought otherwise! It, quite unreasonably, wanted some light. Lots of experimenting later, the camera and I agreed on:
1 table lamp, 1 floor lamp, light from hallway with door open, small wall lights from dining room with glass door closed and, bizarrely, tv on. Tripod as low as it would go, Me - very uncomfortable on hard wood floor, with consoling licks from concerned dog who thought I'd lost my marbles (or had treats in my pocket
) Mr JG retreated to his shed - wise man.
Lessons learned:
1 Don't joke about having no ideas. It might happen (and very nearly did!)
2 Heath Robinson can keep his Heath Robinson contraptions - I'd swap for a couple or three Bowens and an infinity cove any day.
3 The next best thing to light is texture. I used film grain on the background to separate it from the head.
4 I'm hopeless at doing Quick Mask neatly - or quickly. And trying to correct it by cloning isn't good, either.
5 Cloning out creases in the backdrop is nearly as tedious as ironing them out!
6 Using the camera in portrait mode on a very low tripod is a pain in the a***, the back, the neck, the elbows and several other places.
7 Adjusting settings in near darkness is also a pain.
8 If you're working in near darkness, get a torch!
9 Don't try stupid ideas when you're tired - it just makes you do stupid things even more stupidly.
10 I've regressed to not planning the shot, not having what I need to hand and generally being disorganised.
11 The thought of doing a reshoot from a previous week leaves me needing to lie down in a DARK room
help
with a large glass of wine.
As always your comments are most welcome - good and bad!
Thanks for looking
Jean
(Admin - isn't it time we had an 'enjoying glass of wine' emoticon?? All this beer drinking is fattening!)