Posted by CallyAnn Hamilton on May 15, 2013 in Blog, Photography, Still-life & Product | 2 comments

Light painting is tricky, because it’s hard to know how your image will turn out.  Though I was initially disappointed with this piece, I realized that it looked like the scene was sitting near a window, illuminated by moonlight filtering through tree leaves.  Still, it was pretty dark and blurry, so in Camera Raw I increased the clarity, exposure, vibrancy and saturation.   These little vials were the first thing I wanted to shoot when I saw them arranged with the other light painting scenes.  I have a thing for bottles and colored liquids.  The snoot on my flashlight was sloppy so I had a really hard time controlling the light.  I had to do quite a bit of editing in Camera Raw to reign in the focus. I had way too much light, so I reduced the exposure, whites, and highlights, and boosted the shadows, contrast, vibrancy, and saturation.  Finally, I reduced the clarity and added a vignette to soften the whole image.   This was a difficult scene to arrange and paint.  I didn’t really know what to do with all of the elements, particularly the strange tiles, but I’m satisfied with the somewhat pell-mell result.  I love journals, and if I’d had time, I’m sure I’d have loved to look through these old books.  I didn’t do any edits.   Remember what I said about that “thing” I have for bottles and colored liquids?  That doesn’t quite extend to sodas.  Still, I loved the colors of these classic pops and the way they lit up when I shined my light through them.  I wasn’t very careful about the angle of my tripod so I had to tilt the image in Photoshop and then crop it down.  I used content-aware fill to eliminate a distracting reflection from my flashlight on the red soda.   My last tabletop light painting for the excursion had to be a macro shot, so I borrowed a classmate’s Canon EOS 60D and his macro lens and dialed in on this tiny scene of opulent jewelry.  I had to really squish down the snoot on my flashlight to keep from flooding the whole scene, and I only dared keep the light on for about 10 seconds.  My resulting photo was way too dark, so I had to take it into Camera Raw and boost the vibrance and saturation significantly.  With an adjustment brush I increased the saturation, exposure, and sharpness on the facets of the jewels to bring them out even...