Well, I was trying to get across the idea that although this leaf was in its final days, it was 'young at heart'. I had actually had another, similar image that I had taken (will upload after the challenge) but it didn't quite work out as well, mostly because we had our first real snow of the season today. I tried to work with it, but I wasn't in love with the final image. Unfortunately, by the time I was done editing my first attempt & wanted to take a slightly different approach it was dark outside (and still heavily snow covered).
So, with only a few hours left before the challenge closed, I decided to try to imitate the outdoors in my living room! I even had to go hunting outside in the dark with a flashlight, digging in the snow, to find some new leaves to work with. I also searched around for some old, rustic wood in my yard, too. Lighting was experimental, mostly, and accomplished with 2 Pentax AF540FGZ strobes. The key light strobe was placed in a 28" collapsable softbox about 2 feet above, maybe 35 degrees off axis to the subject and about 18 inches away (fairly close). Nothing unusual there, but I did do something relatively strange with my other strobe. I took a large shoot-thru umbrella and placed behind but slightly over the subject with the curve of it sort of enveloping the area of focus. I then placed my second strobe low and next to the edge of the umbrella, firing it up into the umbrella. A large amount of this 2nd strobes light bounced off the edge, creating texture along the surface because it acted like a sidelight. This also helped the green portion of the leaf glow a little by backlighting it a smidge. A smaller portion of this second strobe's light bounced off the entire surface of the umbrella creating a natural, diffuse overhead feel - just like in a forest. My key strobe was wired via a flash extension cable and set to "master' for wireless operation with +1 stop exposure compensation. Strobe # 2 was set to slave & set to -1.5 stop exposure compensation with a ratio setting of 1/3. I think in the end I ended up settling at +.5 stop exposure comp on my camera, though. The toughest parts of lighting this was (1) getting the ratio right so it looked natural, and (2) position the key jsut right so that there was minimal specular glare off the leaf surface.
Post was fairly cut & dry in PS CS3: subtle adjustments in Camera RAW; localized sharpening around the area of focus; a few adjustment layers of curves, levels & selective color; a soft light layer of the green channel, some straightening, cropping and border then off to Save for Web.
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Gotta admit I had higher hopes for this one, but everyone's a critic, eh? I do wonder if I had used one of my original leaves where the cutout was rough if it would have done better, but the clean cut of the heart was an intentional contrast to all the other roughness.
Thanks for the great comments from those that liked it!
Here's the first image referenced above, my alternate entry:
Here's the set-up:
My original inspiration:
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Place: 17 out of 105 Avg (all users): 6.0556 Avg (commenters): 7.3846 Avg (participants): 5.8333 Avg (non-participants): 6.1491 Views since voting: 1763 Views during voting: 292 Votes: 162 Comments: 16 Favorites: 3 (view)
Like the colours, textures and shallow DOF. Interesting cut-out idea. Am not sure whether I'd prefer the more natural version without the window to the green leaf beneath...
Neat photo. I like the young at heart message and it is creative.
The think the overall composition is good. I like the DOF of this image. The lighting in my opinion is perfect.
My only complaint would be the fact the heart was cut out of the red leaf. The clean lines of the cut feel unnatural. Your photo contains a lot of great texture and I think the cut takes a way from it a little bit.
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