LightningPaul

Kids love to play with plasticine. It is so fascinating to see them building all kind of objects.
With the help of some adult children they managed to make a cool car. I only had a few seconds before this vehicle changed into something else.


THANKS: for all the kind comments you have all posted. I really appreciate them a lot. It keeps me motivated to post good images together with the necessary technical info.



TECH-INFO: I quickly managed to take a JPG without any distracting background, thanks to a long focal length which provided the blur and narrowed down the angle.
Because the kids where playing at the table (and other people where passing by), I used two speedlight flashes pointed to the ceiling. They were wirelessy triggered. I configured the power on the flashes and the exposure settings on my camera manually so that I have a consistent lighting. If you work with flash light then only the ISO, aperture and flash power are important. I keep the shutterspeed to a minimum to kill all the annoying, ugly, green-yellow colored ambient light, mainly coming from a mix of bulbs and saving lamps. For adjusting the exposure I use the trial and error method: I take a picture and look at the histogram and highlight clipping screen at the back of my camera. After some practice you only need to do one or two test shots.

For post processing I did some basic lens correction in DxO and cropped it in 2/1 ratio. Afterwards I cleaned a few pieces of plasticine laying around the car with the spot healing brush and cloning stamp. Finally I slightly darkened the top and bottom using the gradient tool and HSL adjustment layers. This gives more depth to the image.